The cruel mob pursued 13 year old Megan Meier through our high tech “social networking site MySpace and called Megan a liar, a fat whore and worse”.
Megan, 13, fought back, but she was overwhelmed. “Mom, they’re being horrible!” Megan said, “sobbing into the phone when her mother called. After an hour, Megan ran into her bedroom and hanged herself with a belt.”
“She felt there was no way out,” Ms. Meier said.
McLuhan has stated that all technology is an extension of a human faculty. The ‘bomb is an extension of the fist’ is a simple example.
“The Medium is The Message” is the phrase that made Marshall McLuhan famous. It is a phrase most of us, young and old, have heard. Until recently this was a mysterious phrase that left me speechless.
Let’s get very fundamental here and go back to the invention of the alphabet to understand what McLuhan is talking about and why it is important.
“The Greek myth about the alphabet was that Cadmus, reputedly the king who introduced the phonetic letters into Greece, sowed dragoon’s teeth, and they sprang up armed men. Like any other myth, this one capsulates a prolonged process into a flashing insight. The alphabet meant power and authority and control of military structures at a distance. When combined with papyrus, the alphabet spelled the end of the stationary temple bureaucracies and the priestly monopolies of knowledge and power.”
“The phonetic alphabet is a unique technology…This stark division and parallelism between a visual and an auditory world was both crude and ruthless, culturally speaking. The phonetically written sacrifices worlds of meaning and perception that were secured by forms like the hieroglyphs and the Chinese ideogram. These culturally richer forms of writing, however, offered men no means of sudden transfer from the magically discontinuous and traditional world of the tribal word into the cool and uniform visual medium.”
“All of these forms [pictographic and hieroglyphic] give pictorial expression to oral meanings. As such, they approximate the animated cartoon and are extremely unwieldy, requiring many signs for the infinity of data operations of social action. In contrast, the phonetic alphabet, by a few letters only, was able to encompass all languages.”
Consider the invention of the printing press and the introduction of books to the society. A book communicates a message. Many books communicate many messages. ‘The book’ communicates the same message to everyone who comes into contact with the book. The book transmits the same message to everyone while many books transmit many different messages to many different people.
Evolution moves very slowly. We adapt to our environment very slowly. We survive because we do adapt. When we change more quickly than we can adapt we face problems that we have not had the time to make the kind of adjustments necessary.
The habits we acquire determine our state of mind. Our changing habits are part of this process of adaptation to our environment. Do not think of environment as being just the quality of our air or water but it is a broad term signifying the world we live in.
So we have changed very dramatically our habits that were part of us when we knew little and understood much. I am speaking relatively here. What happens to us as a result of this dramatic change? I do not know but I only point to the fact as worth consideration.
Examine how we sit and watch TV for several hours everyday. When we watch TV we are constantly being transported perceptively from one scene to another. Think for a minute if instead of sitting and watching TV we were physically escorted done a hallway with many doors. Then we open a door and are physically placed into this world we see on TV. Our reaction would be very different. In other words we are creatures prepared for a certain world that no longer exists. This is the definition of a forthcoming extinction if we think about the meaning of evolution.
Has our technology become our master? I think so.
This story about Megan by Christopher Maag, “When the Bullies Turned Faceless” was published in the December 17 edition of the NYTimes.
Holy crap. I don't know what else to say about that. That's just wrong. Our technology has become our master. We all rely on it WAY too much. If it gets to a point where a 13 year old girl commits suicide simply because a group unknown to her call her things like a whore, then it's getting a little too far.
Saying that, that mob is a bunch of heartless b******s.
I'm interested in hearing what others have to say about this. I'll keep an eye on this thread.
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This is how it hurts when I pretend I don't feel any pain ... This is how I disappear when I throw myself away
The book is the medium. The book makes us a very different people. We have a much different frame of mind resulting from books than before books. The content in a book is insignificant as compared to the reality of books. The content of a book may change many lives but the book as a medium as a new technology changes the life of the species for ever.
If technology forces us forward faster than we can adapt we will fall. Just as a runner falls if she leans over further than her legs can come forward and support her weight.
If we can control our technology we can better control our fate. If we fail to comprehend our relationship with technology then we will fail to survive because we cannot adapt fast enough. We create our culture. Our culture is artificial just as most of the human life is about artificial values. We create what we live, die, and kill for.
Our habits determine our fate to a large extent. Our habits, just like the habits of an athlete will determine success. Our habits prepare us for the now. Now is no time to change habits—habits control what we can or cannot do at the moment action is required. This includes especially our habits of mind. If we do not form an honest mind we will not behave honestly intellectually when the time requires it. This is what CT (Critical Thinking) is partially about. By studying CT we are creating the proper set of intellectual habits that we will guide us in the future.
I think that McLuhan had great insight and is well worth the effort to comprehend.
Bardock42 is a whimpering pussy now who lost his flare to debate vigorously and just spouts senseless and thinly veiled puns here and there. You nazi pr*ck. Get your balls back from whoever you sold them to, you fat f*ck. What happened to the manly, chubby German big mouth we once knew, who'd flatten ignorance with a solid argument? Now it's like Andy Dick meets John Candy. You hybrid beefcake. Suck my c*ck
I get the vague feeling that some of coberst's musings belong in the conspiracy forum. Or GDF, at least. I fail to see how this qualifies as philosophy, in the generally accepted sense of the word.
Gender: Male Location: Still tired....still hiking.
Looks like more and more measures are being taken to prevent cyber bullying. Here's a few recent articles I found on it. Seems authorities are mainly focussing on teens, which is lucky for me. I like to threaten to kill people on KMC once in a while. I better cut down on that.
Gender: Male Location: USA, Oklahoma. Pewpy balls.
Re: Re: Re: Cyber bullying: Technology and McLuhan
I bet a douche-bag that laughs are 13-year-old girls who are traumitized to the point of suicide, would also be dick enough to post a PM that you "didn't" want posted on the forums. Just a hunch.
Bardock42 is a whimpering pussy now who lost his flare to debate vigorously and just spouts senseless and thinly veiled puns here and there. You nazi pr*ck. Get your balls back from whoever you sold them to, you fat f*ck. What happened to the manly, chubby German big mouth we once knew, who'd flatten ignorance with a solid argument? Now it's like Andy Dick meets John Candy. You hybrid beefcake. Suck my c*ck
I heard this my dad got the report at his job.It's sad, I mean people shouldnt bully others mainly on the internet.Because you don't know if they have problems or how they will take it. This led to a girl dying ,which is sad. Though people cant do anything but there should be something done . Because the girls family lost her,and had to suffer.I scaned through this i know the story.
Bullying in any form away hurts kids that people don't even know could happen.
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Dec 17th, 2007 12:52 PM
