Please hand me that extension for my life

The other day I wrote an article for the Retriever about Quadmania food, which wasn’t all that great to begin with. Instead of writing just a plain food review, I decided to do the history of carnival food. So I hopped to my lap top and looked up cotton candy. My search returned 24,400 million results. It was so easy to just type in cotton candy and get the history of it in the first click of my mouse. I bet so many others are feeling the same way. Our society is so quick and we need everything right now. Since newspapers come out daily or weekly, one doesn’t always have time to contact a cotton candy expert and find out exactly where it came from.
Marshall McLuhan coined the term “the medium is the message,” he didn’t mean that what is on the medium i.e. the computer’s search result, is the message. Instead, the message is that our society has sped up and we need this piece of technology to get instant information. It is an extension of us as a culture. One could almost use McLuhan’s quote synonymously with technological determinism. They both view technology as a creation from the need of society. But unlike technological determinism, McLuhan wrote in his book “Understanding Media,” that these mediums require different levels of participation as well. He called the levels hot and cold media. Hot requires one sense and cold requires the receiver to use multiple senses to make sense of what they are taking in.
Take newspapers for example, they have gotten more competitive and want to be the one who has that shark bite victim (just humor me here) on the front page. They are not going to pull out a book of maps, most of the time, they are going to Map Quest the scene and look it up to see if there has been other reports of attack victims. I know that when I want to find out small amounts of information it has become a reflex (if you will) for me to Google.
I also can’t help but look at the cell phone. The phone came out as a means of communicating with one another but since society has grown more and more distant and private, the phone has miraculously sprung the text messaging service so people don’t have to talk to one another and can get a small blip of information because we have received short attention spans as a process of needing new technology. Thanks. Now what was I saying? Oh yeah, the cell phone was—and still is—the cause of accidents. People couldn’t possibly hold a cell phone between their shoulders and ear and expect to drive, right? Well Motorola and a bunch of others felt the need to give us Bluetooth earpiece, not because we wanted it, because subconsciously (and maybe consciously) the public demanded it.
Politics always want to reach people on a different level and want to be one up on their competition. Many politicians have taken to the internet and have created their own message boards and platforms for their campaign. Message boards and social networking sites are not new but it is new that presidents have a MySpace or Facebook to get the voice of the public. After all this is a democracy and we do hold the power of the president (supposedly) and since the war on terror and other foreign policies keep the president busy they need a way of still being able to get into the living rooms of the voters.
Even dating has taken on a new form; apparently 236 singles a day are getting married from meeting on eHarmony. eHarmony doesn’t bribe people to join, people join on their own because they needed a safe place to meet because of our society’s paranoia in dating and the actual danger that one could face. That is not to say someone from eHarmony could turn out to be a serial killer. It is the fact that the nervousness shouldn’t have to be dealt with. Our society doesn’t look kindly upon suffering and sadness, although those are real and basic human emotions, one rather avoids it altogether.
However, the two pieces of information technology that has been discussed so far has had its intended consequences but like everything there is a yang to its yin. In; “What is the Meaning of The Medium is the Message?” Mark Federman states that there are “unintended consequences.” Those are the factors that have been left out of developing this new technology. Even though information given to the public and journalists comes at the speed of light is a god send, child predators can communicate as fast (and sometimes faster) with a child. According to ABC news online, there are 50 thousand predators patrolling the internet at any given time. Although and “unintended consequence,” this is another example of “the medium is the message.”
In chapter 32 of Communication in History, Marshall McLuhan quotes a voice from a radio poll that says “I live right inside radio when I listen. I more easily loose myself in radio than in a book.” Indeed teens and adults too are living on their cell phone. Just before I typed this blog, I was at the mall and sitting at the food court were 30 people, at least 19 of them were on cell phones. The cell phone has become such a mode of distraction that guides to self protection warn of walking through a parking lot entranced on a phone. This is something I still see when I go out and after the clubs close it is a frenzy of cell phone calls.
But does the medium, no matter what the content, have the same effect on society? It seems pretty farfetched to think that if the computer displayed only images of dead puppies and the phone always let one listen to sounds of babies crying that society would still be the same, it is true. Why? Because that piece of technology would be needed by us. Just like the child predators that need the computer to sneak around anonymously and not risk getting caught in family friendly parks.