Identity and Violence as described by Marshall McLuhan

An Interpretation of -
Identity and Violence as described by Marshall McLuhan;

Ode to the evolution of our nervous system.

Marshall McLuhan spoke of the media and its vast effects in the 1930s and even made all of his postulates intriguingly relevant to his more recent audience inviting them to participate in his uber intellectual and futuristic pronouncements in the 1970s. I find that even though time has learnedly evolved and with it, also has many technologically ordained gadgets, the essence of his dialogue and the presence of mind with which he had foreseen and given time to the inevitable structural changes in societal tendencies, in the aftermath of total endowment of our faculties to artificial intelligence, is germane to any ongoing dialogue about the subject today.

His postulates were conducive to a curious media savvy audience but his teachings and fore sight had also made an impression in the world of science and Psychology. This amalgamation of concepts and paradigms is pertinent to the way I would like to analyze a given subject. For there cannot be a separation of the two if a study ought to be accurate.

 He effortlessly served those who questioned the nature of media as being transient and ethereal and hence less relevant to the more consequentially conferred evidences in real life. He was one of the first to speak freely of the importance of a dialogue about the blatant use of inconspicuous sexuality in the success of media and coined it to be forever the “wedding of sex and media”. While he marveled over the obvious power of the media now and the media he had foreseen as a formulaically accurate arena in which to gauge our evolution as a species as well as the evolution of technology – he also and very rightfully, brought in elements of neuroscience to the fore front and went on to illuminate the receptive public of the connections between the loss of identity and violence as a result of  blindly giving in to  television anarchy.

McLuhanisms, as his maxims were endearingly pegged, were engrained with evidence and thought about how television and technology on the one hand was liberating to a society’s standing and its endeavor to “continue on a higher plane” but on the other was also cumulatively a tactic on the part of capitalists and those that harbored an abrasive mentality towards mankind and all else. To him a “global village” was an open territory for acts of selfishness and humanistic debauchery – explaining the obvious and gradual decline of ethics and the birth of the ferocious and less understood state-of-the-art modern. He qualifies these statements with a direct allusion to the Advertising Industry where he said “ Ad is only a substitute for the product” – meaning what remains to be said about the undefined product will only be inferred through double entendre and mesmerizing latent sexual connotations and subversive imagery. He connected the effects of television to addiction and soporific opiates and the changes that manifest as a result of the instruments people employ and influence others by, during the course of their lives.