Being, things and gadgets
15
Mar
This name for digital devices appeared long before the internet and the digital explosion, is in Marshall McLuhan’s book of the 1960s: Understanding Media.
Many remember him only by the phrases: “the global village” and “the medium is the message,” but few are aware of his approach to the digital world, and still less is he aware of the profound influence that Teilhard Chardin’s Noosphere had on his mind.
Some of McLuhan’s main ideas consisted in foreseeing a more conscious world and even “even in a hyperconnected world, where everyone has the ability to regulate their own experience,” a reading different from the apocalyptic ones.
The ideas that many learn well but continue to forget are the advances and possibilities of a world increasingly a “village” and that problems previously veiled, such as being itself was veiled, are now exposed by the “media.”
We just have to choose to exclude these advances, if we are hiding in our minds somehow, our consciousness of being, of everything that exists beyond the labels and devices that they use, this is not for the internet, but for cars, designer clothes , finally, a series of objects of consumption that seem to qualify the being, and why there is so much emptiness?
This is what we tried to answer in the previous posts, too academic perhaps, but without revisiting human thought we can stay in the superficiality of “things”.
To escape from a difficult discourse about being, but one must recognize it as “being-of-all” I read a page from the Gift of the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who writes:
“For life today in America is based on the premise of ever-widening circles of contact and communication. It involves not only to family demands, but community demands, national demands, international demands on the good citizen, through social and cultural pressures, through newspapers, magazines, radio programs, political drivers, charitable appeals and so on. My mind reels with it…It does not bring grace; it destroys the soul.”
But she was not talking about the Internet, Makron Books released a book commemorating 50 years of the book in 2015, the book is from 1975, so this was already a previous reality of the internet, just as the gadget name was used by McLuhan in the 60’s .
This is a reality of Being, already observed at the beginning of the last century, the digital world is an additional component in the complexity of contemporary man.
