Disappearing Worlds: social media and the loss of identity

Marshall McLuhan, my favorite philosopher, always ascribed violent behavior to the lack of identity. The perpetrator of violence against others lacks invariably lacks a sense of self. The lack of a sense of self probably leads to self-destruction as well.

An article in the New Yorker, June 5 & 12, 2017, entitled "The Addicts Next Door" described the catastrophic toll of opioid and heroin addiction plaguing the state of West Virginia. Entire communities have been ravaged by drug overdoses and author Margaret Talbot describes the situation in harrowing detail. Parents have overdosed in front of their neighbors and their own children. One scene depicted parents falling face down to the ground at their child's softball game. If lucky, the E.M.T. (Emergency Medical Technicians) staff arrives in time to revive the addict with with a dose of Narcan or by administering CPR. The article offers no satisfactory explanation for why opioid and heroin addiction has become a preferred lifestyle for so many residents of West Virginia.

I told a friend about the article and he texted me an interesting comparison, and a possible explanation:

When Spanish got to the Caribbean the Carib Indians began hanging themselves in large numbers-- lost their world. Like W. Virginia.

Let's turn to maestro McLuhan in his last book "The Global Village," co-authored with Bruce R. Powers. This is from chapter 8, Global Robotism: The Dissatisfactions (p.97)

What may emerge as the most important insight of the twenty-first century is that man was not designed to live at the speed of light. Without the countervailing balance of natural and physical laws, the new video-related media will make man implode upon himself. As he sits in the informational control room, whether at home or at work, receiving data at enormous speeds-- imagistic, sound, or tactile-- from all areas of the world, the results could be dangerously inflating and schizophrenic. His body will remain in one place but his mind will float out in the electronic voice, being everywhere at once in the data bank.

At that point, technology is out of control.

McLuhan died in 1980 and missed out on the development of the cellphone-- though he grasped more  completely the impact of digital technology than any of the more recent media analysts. The "informational control room" now sits in our hand and we stare at its contents incessantly. As McLuhan predicted, we are transported everywhere and vast amounts of information arrive at our brain and central nervous at the speed of light.

The total disruption of our sense of personal identity via the electronic vortex, now called the social media, has wreaked havoc-- and the West Virginia opioid/heroin catastrophe may just be a single expression of the problem.

Our old world has disappeared and countless worlds have intruded upon our existence. The new worlds lack a connection to "natural and physical laws" and leave us in a dispiriting situation, going crazy but meanwhile addicted to technology-- the beast that devours us!

McLuhan Predicts Cellphone... and more (1965)

Marshall McLuhan, media guru of the late 1960s and 1970s, predicted the cellphone in 1965! McLuhan explained the significance of digital media prior to the invention of the personal computer and cellphone technology. Our evidence? An article from May 5, 1965 in The New Yorker magazine. The Talk of the Town column at the front of that issue features  a piece entitled “The McLuhan Metaphor .” The article’s publication coincided with the New York World’s Fair. You remember the World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens, with the famous Unisphere, the globe used in the movie Men in Black…? The globe is still there, not far from LaGuardia Airport and adjacent  to the U.S. Open tennis stadium. The globe is a perfect metaphor for the insights of Marshall McLuhan, the man who coined the phrase “global village” to define the world we now live in. But the real action that May was happening in Brooklyn, the next borough over, where McLuhan delivered a talk at a Presbyterian church.

The New Yorker author describes McLuhan’s lecture at Spencer Memorial Church in Brooklyn and quotes several startling prophecies included in his remarks: “(He) predicted a happy day when everyone will have his own portable computer to cope with the dreary business of digesting information.”

“Dr. McLuhan next suggested the possibility of a new technology that would extend consciousness itself into the environment. ‘A kind of computerized ESP,’ he called it, envisioning ‘consciousness as the corporate content of the environment—and eventually maybe even a small portable computer, about the size of a hearing aid, that would process our private experience through the corporate experience, the way dreams do now.’”

McLuhan’s accurate prediction of the personal computer and smaller portable devices merits no further explanation but the second insight--consciousness as the new environment-- cuts to the very essence of the present digital era.   Imagine the hearing aid device, anticipated by  McLuhan, as an iPhone or other mobile device. Every individual typing into a Facebook or Twitter application shares private experiences with the wider world, and McLuhan uses the term “corporate group” to indicate the wider world. The posts are exactly as McLuhan described, personal, random thoughts offered in a dreamlike manner. McLuhan perceived the new electronic environment as consciousness— and no better description exists of the modern social network.

The author mentions the plan of industrial giant Westinghouse to place a Time Capsule for future generations at the site of the  World’s Fair. The author suggests Marshall McLuhan might be better utilized as a better Time Capsule than a display of mere physical objects, “cultural and technological mementos of twentieth-century man.” The anonymous writer, in a brilliant feat of understatement,  suggests that McLuhan will teach us more about his era, than any of the lavish futuristic exhibits sponsored by Ford and General Motors. I visited those exhibits and remember the emphasis on automobiles buzzing around the superhighways of the future.  Of course, the ctual superhighway of the future became the Internet.

The 1965 The New Yorker writer notes McLuhan entered the scene as an author, “by three startling books on Western civilization-- The Mechanical Bride, The Gutenberg Galaxy, and most recently Understanding Media, in which he joyfully explores the tribal virtues of popular culture, casts a cynical eye on the ‘classification traditions’ that came in with print and sees near-mythic possibilities in our computer age.”

A year later, at the Texas-Stanford Seminar on “The Meaning of Commercial Television” in April 1966, McLuhan explained further. His audacious comments must have surprised the audience of media professionals and scholars:

1)   The western world organizes itself visually by connective, uniform and continuous space.

2)   Every new medium changes our whole spatial orientation.

3)   We are in the business of reprogramming the sensory life of North America, changing the entire outlook and experience of the population.     

                                                              

                                                                                    (Donner 90-93)

McLuhan’s predictions for deepened audience engagement following the shift from print media to electronic media cannot be overstated as essential to understanding the electronic environment. The inability of individuals to separate from the social network even has an acronym (FOMO) referring to a “fear of missing out.” McLuhan’s notion of new technology working as extensions of the human body had achieved new levels of traction in the electronic era, for if clothing extended the skin, and the wheel extended the legs’ ability to achieve movement, “the computer achieved not merely an extension of our eyes, like print, but an extension of our whole nervous system.”  (New Yorker 1965)

McLuhan Predicts Cellphone (The New Yorker, May 5, 1965)

Marshall McLuhan’s prominence as the world’s foremost intellectual  cannot easily be conceived from the remove of the present day. A piece from “The Talk of the Town” column, at the front end of the The New Yorker magazine issue, May 5, 1965, entitled “The McLuhan Metaphor,” was  composed at the same time as the  the New York World’s Fair. The author mentions the Westinghouse company’s plan to place a Time Capsule for future generations at the World's Fair and suggests McLuhan himself could better serve as a time capsule. 

My family visited the World’s Fair that year. I recall lavish futuristic exhibits sponsored by Ford and General Motors,  two industrial companies representing a mechanical age. Their exhibits imagined an automotive future with Jetsons-style highways flying in every direction. But McLuhan envisioned something different, an information age—and a massive change in consciousness.

The New Yorker author describes McLuhan’s lecture at Spencer Memorial Church in Brooklyn and quotes several startling prophecies included in his remarks:

“(He) predicted a happy day when everyone will have his own portable computer to cope with the dreary business of digesting information” and

“Dr. McLuhan next suggested the possibility of a new technology that would extend consciousness itself into the environment. ‘A kind of computerized ESP,’ he called it, envisioning ‘consciousness as the corporate content of the environment—and eventually maybe even a small portable computer, about the size of a hearing aid, that would process our private experience through the corporate experience, the way dreams do now.’”

McLuhan’s accurate prediction of computers, cellphone-sized and smaller, merits no further explanation but the second insight--consciousness as the new environment-- cuts to the very essence of the digital era.  The hearing aid device anticipates the iPhone or other mobile device. Individuals study the phone and share experiences as a corporate entity creating a group consciousness and posts are exactly as McLuhan described-- personal, random thoughts offered in a dreamlike manner. McLuhan perceived the new electronic environment as consciousness— and no better, more succinct description of the modern social network has ever been offered.

McLuhan’s notion of new technology working as extensions of the human body achieves new levels of traction in the electronic era, for if clothing extended the skin, and the wheel extended the legs’ ability to achieve movement, “the computer achieved not merely an extension of our eyes, like print, but an extension of our whole nervous system.”  (New Yorker 1965)