YOLO: You Only Live Online
When “Knowledge of Other” Supersedes “Knowing Other”
In Greek Mythology, Narcissus was a hunter known for his beauty. Proud, he held disdain for any who loved him. He is said to have rejected all his suitors. Nemesis, the incarnation of Aphrodite as “revenge,” noticed Narcissus’s strange obsession. She lured him to a pool where he glanced his reflection in the water and fell in love with it; not realizing it was merely an image. Unable to leave the beauty of his form cast on the water, Narcissus stared longingly at his reflection until he lost his will to live.
Marshall McLuhan, a famed scholar of media and technology, argues that the West misinterprets the myth of Narcissus by assuming that Narcissus fell so in love with his image that he drowned. Drawing connections to technology, McLuhan notes that the water performs as a technology — a mirror — that exteriorizes Narcissus’s body. Seemingly extended elsewhere yet not, Narcissus became narcotized by his image, not because he was so in love with himself that he could not turn away; but rather, because the extension of himself provided a release from his embodied corporeal form. Narcissus was narcotized by the illusion of existing elsewhere, even though this meant that he effectively negated the reality of his material form in his watery transfixion.
