Marshall McLuhan- "Media Mastermind"

Marshall McLuhan seems to have been the Elon Musk of the late sixties- mixed with Albert Einstein and a dash of Karl Marx. He theorized about how the media affects humanity, and it oddly applies to today. McLuhan is similar to The Simpsons in that way-predicting our future without us even realizing.

His main point is that each new form of technology absorbs the functionality of all the technology before it. I think that's not unlike Isaac Newton's scientific laws, the one where he says that once energy is created, it cannot be destroyed. When the first cell phone was invented, it was just uphill since. They got sleeker and easier and more ingrained into our palms. So much so, that now our pinky fingers have an indent in them to perfectly cradle our smartphones. There is a total cultural environment within which the media functions, according to McLuhan. Those smartphones ingrained in our palms are our whole worlds. They're what we wake up and reach for, and the last thing we see at night. It's insane how much our phones have become a part of our lives and we don't even realize it. But that's another one of McLuhan's points. He called it self-hypnosis Narcissus Narcosis, a syndrome where man remains unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology. Why would we stop to think about how many hours a day we are on our phones? If we stopped to think about that, that number might shock us, even devastate us. 4, 5, 6 hours a day scrolling on a handheld computer instead of looking up and embracing the present world around us. If we stopped to think about our psychological connection to "likes" and instant validation, we would be faced with the truth. And the truth is that we have become addicted to the retweets and favorites, the "feeds" and "dashboards." We are so addicted that for some, that is their preferred way of communicating. And it's uncomfortable for a lot of people to admit addiction to their phones. Myself, included. It's pathetic that I need notifications to validate my worth, that I need to stay constantly connected despite being in a room full of people. It has warped our sense of status. When a person flips over their phone, and the screen lights up to a dozen or so notifications from a variety of platforms, we don't think, "hey, that's kind of crazy how technology has sunk into our everyday life and completely taken over our sense of self image and worth." We think, "hey that's cool!" Or as McLuhan would say, stay comfortably numb.