We recently discussed Marshall McLuhan in class and looked at his theories on how tools and technologies may become extensions of who we are, influencing how we behave and how we interact with the environment. A useful foundation for thinking about how our usage of digital tools and social media platforms might affect our identities, our relationships, and our larger cultural and political environment is provided by McLuhan’s approach to analyzing the impact of technology on society.
The idea that “the medium is the message” argues that our experience and perception of the world are shaped by the form of a media rather than the substance it transmits is one of McLuhan’s most important insights. In other words, how we use a tool or piece of technology can have just as much of an impact as the data or messages it allows us to access or send. This has significant ramifications for how we use social media and digital tools, which are intended to influence our behavior in a number of ways and shape our experiences.
The idea of “the global village” that McLuhan introduced is another significant addition. It depicts how digital technologies are erasing geographical and temporal boundaries and allowing us to interact and collaborate with people from all over the world. This raises significant concerns about the influence of digital technologies on social and political institutions and the possibility for new forms of exploitation and injustice to emerge in the digital space, as well as great potential for fostering cross-cultural understanding and collaboration.
Personally, I find McLuhan’s theories to be both fascinating and difficult since they push us to reflect critically on how we utilize digital tools and social media platforms as well as to take into account the larger social and cultural ramifications of these technologies. For instance, I’ve been considering how my use of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter has influenced my own self-perception and interpersonal connections, as well as how these sites have been used to amplify voices, support social movements, spread misinformation, and stoke conflict.
Overall, I think that McLuhan’s method of understanding how the tools we frequently use end up molding us and our society offers a useful framework for questioning how we use digital tools and social media platforms and for considering the effects of these technologies on our lives and the world around us critically. We can work to create a more responsible and sustainable digital society for the future by being conscious of the potential for digital tools to shape our behavior and affect our perceptions and by attempting to use them in ways that promote transparency, empathy, and accountability.