McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan's phrase Narcissus narcosis pertains directly with the trends of social media where people post statuses and pictures of themselves creating a self-absorbed image of themselves thus creating a separation of importance between the individual posting thinks they are the most important person and everyone else is not important. This surfaces in different situations outside of social media, where people do not think of the people around themselves and take unnecessary actions or risks because they only care about themselves, an example of this type of behavior is when someone cuts off people while driving even though traffic is moving at a pace above the speed limit and the only reason they cut people off is because they think everyone needs to get out of the way so they can get to where they are going and no one else has to be somewhere important. A recent invention called the “Selfie-Stick” supports the idea of people becoming more narcissistic because we had to invent a piece of technology to help take a picture of ourselves to show other people what we look like everyday and what we are doing, while hoping someone will notice us and take up interest in our lives.

The tribal culture McLuhan brings up differs with the way humans interact now with the technology we use where talking face to face does not appear as popular for a magnitude of people where texting and instant messaging on computers makes conversations quicker and more convenient however; the drawback of communicating this way the written words can be misinterpreted when the recipient reads it. The misinterpretation can result in an over reaction because people can only read the words for what they are and if the words where spoken it would bring on a different meaning for every different tone being used to change the meaning like emphasis on a phrase or even if the person uses sarcasm making a joke. Currently when people go on nature exhibition it can force people to disconnect from their technology and take in all the sights and sounds around them, which relaxes the mind from the high speed life style of social media and the internet.

The evolution of technology over time creates a new environment which society needs to adjust to and upon adjusting to the new environment an innovation on the current technology creates a slight change, such as a website going down for maintenance and slight changes are made, but the changes are different enough to create a need to adjust to what each button on the page does, and change the muscle memory people develop after repeating the same action over and over. The pencil is another example of technology evolving over time where the mineral used for the writing has changed from lead to graphite, and even further mechanical pencils have extended the length of time one pencil can be used by just having to add strips of graphite to replace what has been used.