It's so interesting to see how all my classes are tying in with one another this semester! For example, in here we read The Medium is the Massage by Marshal McLuhan, which asserted the idea that "The media work us over entirely". This, to my knowledge, means that our society is shaped by not only the messages the media deliver, but also by the media that are delivering these messages. Examples of this include the idea that reading encourages one type of thinking, while the Internet encourages another.
In my fiction class, we recently read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, which is centered around a society in which books are burned and only a certain type of entertainment--one that discourages independent thought--is allowed. As we were given the first reading assignment from this book, my professor exclaimed "This isn't science fiction anymore! This is real life!" I suppose he meant that today, many people no longer read books unless they have to; they prefer other forms of media, such as television or the Internet. If what McLuhan states in The Medium is the Massage is true, then this has changed our society's collective way of thinking. Two of my professors even used the same example of this, when they pointed out that even today's political debates are more a form of entertainment than what they were a few hundred years ago--that is, 7 hour speeches for which people sat patiently. Today, there are few people--few Americans, at least--who could stomach anything that required such sustained attention.
And then there is the issue of SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), that wanted to completely shut down (at least in the United States) several websites, such as YouTube, Facebook, and Tumblr, illegal, as well as the sharing of any copyrighted information through the internet. If McLuhan's media = massage assertion is in any way true, (and it appears to be,) this would essentially put our society back about ten years into the past. Even if some people rarely use the internet, it would still affect the spread of knowledge and cultural thought in general, and would indirectly affect these people. To me, the idea of such a law is not only inconvenient, but also chilling--What it would do, essentially, is restrict the flow of knowledge between people. To me, to make sharing information illegal is more a crime than watching a YouTube video.
We pretend in our society that we don't know how it has progressed to this, with SOPA and the like, with the obsolete materials being phased out by technology. There's always someone who has the future prophecized. McLuhan knew it, Bradbury knew it.
ReplyDeleteRemember the "shells" that people would put in their ears in Fahrenheit 451? Not more than a decade later, Bradbury saw a husband and wife walking a dog, the woman holding a small radio and a "a dainty cone plugged into her right ear." Nowadays we have ear buds and cell phones. How many texters have you seen walk out onto the street without looking on campus? I think that alone proves that too many people in our generation are so disconnected from reality.
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