Marshall
McLuhan originally published “The Medium is the Massage” in 1967,
yet in it he mentions, “Electrical information devices for
universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance…” So far in the
21st century one of our largest societal conflicts has been in
cyber-space, over this debate about what is private and what is
public.
How
much work do these electrical devices McLuhan mentioned have to do to
track and spy on our every move when most people put their every
thought, action and life event-no matter how trivial- on Facebook,
Twitter or Instagram? The National Security Agency (NSA) has spent a
large amount of its time and budget collecting exactly this
information which people share freely. Though apparently when it’s
done by a government agency people seem to freak out. Who gets to
decide what is private when we spend so much of our time making sure
everything we do is known by all of our “friends” and followers?
Why do people feel the need or right to react negatively to this
information being known by strangers sitting at a computer screen in
dark government cubicles
McLuhan
envisaged this conflict between, “...our claim to privacy and the
community's need to know.” and mentions the “…new methods of
instantaneous electric information retrieval,” decades before
server farms took up acres of space at a secret location in the
desert. If this seemed like such an obvious occurrance to McLuhan in
the mid 1960s- when computers took up entire rooms worth of space-
then why has it taken till now for us to catch up to him? Why did we
fall into the exact pothole that McLuhan seemed to have seen coming
and tried to warn us about?
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