Our Environments and The Digital Age

One of the topics explored by McLuhan in The Medium is the Massage that I found interesting is that of the change in our environment brought on by media and technology. This is investigated throughout the book, but in a few pages I think that he speaks about this in more detail and more closely. On page 61, he begins to talk about the idea of jail cells and how they became vital to corrective practices and how this concept doesn’t work well in our, now, technological world. He argues that the idea of being put in a closed space alone was enforced to make humans feel guilty about the crime they committed, but that this can’t be the case anymore. He says that, “The whole concept of enclosure as a means of constraint and as a means of classifying doesn’t work as well in our electric culture. The new feeling that people have about guilt is not something that can be privately assigned to some individual, but is, rather, something shared by everybody, in some mysterious way” (McLuhan, 61). He connects the idea of guilt to the idea of connectedness. He is saying that because of this connectedness, no one can really feel private feelings anymore.

McLuhan then connects this with our environments as a whole, and how time and space are no longer what they used to be. He argues that we are moving faster than ever now, and we must always be aware of the consequences of our actions and therefore always be living in the future. This concept connects to the digital age because we live in a world where we always feel anxious. We always feel like there is something else to do, somewhere else to be, and someone else to talk to. We are constantly feeling like there is more information to be found and that’s because information is constantly being thrown at as from all different angles. McLuhan says, “Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information” (McLuhan, 63). This is a powerful statement, and very accurate when discussing the digital age. We live in a world where we have the idea that information is endless. There is always something new, whether it be news, information, or an object. There is always something new to be seen or something new to be bought.

McLuhan says that instant communication causes us to feel and behave differently than we have in the past. We as a society co-exist and interact constantly, which causes us to not even have our own private thoughts anymore. I don’t think I agree with this statement, or maybe I don’t fully understand it. I don’t understand his idea of “private guilt” because I believe that we can always have our own feelings and reactions to things. This idea confuses me a little bit, but I do understand his theories of constant connectedness and feelings of always living in the future. Later on when he talks about how we used to be “separate individuals walking around with separate, fixed, points of view” (McLuhan, 68) and how this isn’t the case anymore. This begins to bring his ideas of our new environments to light for me, but it still confuses me a bit. It brings the idea to light because in the digital age, we are much more open to new ideas and ways of living where in the past, we as a society lived in a very fixed way. We had the same ideas and did the same things every day and never really thought that there may be another way to do things. But it still confuses me a little bit because of the idea of being separate individuals. I still believe we have our own thoughts and feelings. I think he may mean that as a constantly connected society, we are conforming to the way others think since we are constantly interacting in some way. McLuhan has very knowledgeable, intellectual, and somewhat confusing theories about society and our environments in regard to mass media. I agree and understand it for the most part, but there are definitely ideas and concepts that I struggle with.