Post 4 - Resource A

 After reading the article it became clear a connection to Marshall McLuhan’s medium theory of the human sensorium. This idea he made argues that media technologies do not only deliver information but they also change how human beings perceive, organize, and experience life. His famous statement that “the medium is the message” means that the most important effects of a medium are not its specific contents, but the changes in scale, pace, and pattern it introduces into human life. Charlie Warzel’s article “Doomscrolling Is Over: Now Everyone Is Monitoring the Situation” and its discussion of the World Monitor website offers a striking example of McLuhan’s ideas. The site, which combines live data streams such as stock prices, satellite movements, weather alerts, airport delays, fires, and global news feeds into one interface, demonstrates how digital media reshape the senses. It also reflects what has been called the Canadian discourse of technology by emphasizing the environmental and social consequences of technological systems.

First, the World Monitor exemplifies McLuhan’s theory of the human sensorium because it reorganizes perception. McLuhan believed that each dominant medium alters the ratio of the senses. Print culture privileged linear vision, sequence, and detached analysis. Electronic media by contrast restore simultaneity, speed, and total involvement. The World Monitor immerses users in multiple streams of real-time data all at once. And this is what had drawn me into choosing this topic. Rather than reading one story from beginning to end, the user scans dashboards with real time alerts, around the world maps, videos. This produces a sensory environment based on immediacy and simultaneity rather than reflection. The user no longer encounters the world as a series of separate events, but as one continuous field of  attention drawing parts. It is a lot but does the job at conveying messages and inforamtion.

This directly reflects McLuhan’s claim that the message of a medium is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The World Monitor increases the scale of awareness by making global crises visible in one place. It accelerates the pace of experience because information updates constantly in real time. It changes the pattern of attention because users are trained to monitor rather than contemplate. The real “message” of the platform is not any individual news story or weather warning. Instead, its message is the creation of a new mode of consciousness in which people feel compelled to stay perpetually alert to global instability right from wherever they are. The article’s idea that doomscrolling has evolved into “monitoring the situation” is especially revealing through a McLuhan lens. Doomscrolling still resembled older media habits, one that is moved linearly through headlines or social feeds, consuming stories one after another. Monitoring the situation is different. It transforms attention into a state of surveillance. This resembles McLuhan’s notion that media become environments we often fail to notice because they surround us so completely. The World Monitor is not just a tool we use but it becomes a habitat for perception itself.

McLuhan’s comments about the electric light are also relevant here. He notes that the electric light is “pure information,” a medium whose significance lies not in content but in the conditions it creates. Similarly, the World Monitor’s power lies less in the accuracy or importance of each data stream than in the ambient state of awareness it generates. The platform creates an atmosphere of urgency, vigilance, and interconnectedness. Even when nothing dramatic is happening, the constant movement of numbers, maps, and alerts keeps users psychologically engaged. Like electric light extending the day, the World Monitor extends crisis-consciousness into every moment. The psychic consequences of this medium are significant. McLuhan warned that media technologies shape inner life as much as social structures. Constant exposure to live indicators of disaster can heighten anxiety, fragment concentration, and normalize stress all very dangerous for us. Users may begin to feel that if they stop watching, they lose control or everyday activities can have stressful implications now. This is a new form of compulsion rooted not in any single piece of content, but in the medium’s structure of endless updating and constant availability.

The World Monitor also demonstrates the Canadian discourse of technology. This tradition, associated with thinkers such as Harold Innis, George Grant, and McLuhan, often focuses on how technologies reorganize environments and power relations rather than simply celebrating innovation. Technology is understood not as neutral machinery, but as a force that transforms culture, politics, and everyday life. The World Monitor appears useful and empowering because it provides information. Yet from a Canadian technological perspective, it also creates new dependencies and vulnerabilities. It encourages citizens to become spectators of crisis rather than participants in local communities or even maybe a change to stop these issues. It privileges speed over judgment and reaction over reflection. Furthermore, the Canadian discourse of technology often stresses how communication systems centralize control and shape collective consciousness. The World Monitor gathers diverse events into one interface, turning the planet into a single visual field. This recalls McLuhan’s concept of the “global village,” where electronic media collapse distance and make distant events feel immediate. However, the global village is not necessarily peaceful or harmonious. It can also mean living in constant awareness of conflict, disaster, and instability. The World Monitor intensifies this condition by presenting the world as an endless emergency room of data.

The article can also be connected to McLuhan’s Laws of Media. Every medium, he argued, enhances something, obsolesces something, retrieves something older, and reverses into a new form when pushed to extremes. The World Monitor enhances awareness and speed. It obsolesces slower habits of reading and delayed reflection. It retrieves older practices of watchfulness and vigilance, like keeping lookout for danger. Yet when pushed to extremes, it reverses into helplessness or paranoia, where knowing more does not lead to action but to exhaustion. 

After thinking I am left with the idea, what if I saw something I didnt want to? And it effected me poorly to the point I loose sleep. Would my dependencies and exposure through a screen desensitize or make normal that reaction?

Blog Post 1 - Nicholas Sherrer

I know this is quite a bit later in the course than when we first listened to The Great Lakes Suite by The Rheostatics, but I still thought it was useful to return to what I originally reflected on and then consider how I see that experience now.

When we sat and listened to it in class, with no distractions and simply living in the moment, the music took over my thoughts. Even though I had never heard these sounds before, it felt strangely familiar. It calmed me and allowed me to enjoy it as if I had known it for years. That feeling itself stood out to me: music can make an unfamiliar place feel personal.

Each time a new movement played, it felt like a slideshow of images in my mind. I pictured open water and the times I have taken the boat up to friday harbour, waves crashing against rocks out on a peak in Collingwood, and quiet mornings at a lake where everything feels still growing up. At other moments I imagined rivers, canoeing, wake boarding, or winter ponds frozen over with people playing shinny. The music seemed to move the same way as water does, sometimes calm and reflective, sometimes powerful and unpredictable. And I think that captures how impactful it was to make this imagery and feelings.

Looking back now, I think the listening experience connects to ideas we discussed throughout the course about communication in Canada. The music did not simply describe the Great Lakes but it also made me feel them through sound. It created memories and emotions from my past. That shows how communication is not only about words or facts, but also about atmosphere, sensation, and imagination that the medium provides you. The Great Lakes hold an important place in Canadian identity because they represent nature and our connection between communities through water. Listening to this suite reminded me that water is more than geography and it is something tied to memory, movement, and belonging. The experience of listening was not just hearing music, but drifting with it and letting it carry my thoughts like a current.

Blog 4 - Amisha Lubana

After reading Doomscrolling Is Over, it’s actually kind of hard not to think about McLuhan’s idea that “the medium is the message.” The entire World Monitor concept demonstrates how the platform itself is influencing how we perceive everything, not just what we see online. The platform collects a vast amount of real-time data in one location, including news feeds, flight information, stock market data, and conflict reports. It sounds helpful at first, but it soon becomes overpowering. It kind of puts individuals in this continuous mode of seeing everything at once, rather than helping them understand what's happening. That's precisely what McLuhan was referring to, media changes our thoughts and emotions in addition to providing us with facts.

This is the interesting part from a sensorium perspective. According to McLuhan, media are extensions of our senses, and digital media, in particular, disrupt the equilibrium between them. In short, World Monitor increases our awareness and vision to the point where we can always "see everything happening." However, it actually makes everything feel more intense and chaotic rather than clear. Everything begins to connect together into a single, massive stream of urgency because it seems like your brain has no way to keep up. We can also see how this relates to the technology discourse in Canada. The idea is that technology isn't neutral; instead, it influences our lives and emotions. In this case, people are constantly "monitoring the situation," even when there is little they can do about it, rather than just checking the news. According to the article, this type of activity could potentially act as a coping strategy, demonstrating how technology is having psychological effects on people in addition to social ones.

What stands out the most is that people often feel more nervous or overwhelmed, rather than better educated. So the true "message" of this type of media isn't the news itself, but rather the sense of constant urgency and loss of control. Overall, this piece is a great illustration of McLuhan's concept. The issue isn't just an abundance of information; it's the way the medium is built. Platforms such as World Monitor do more than just show us the world; they transform how we see it. 

Blog 4

In her essay, 'The Captivating Derangement of the Looksmaxxing Movement', Becca Rothfield discusses and critiques the online subculture of pursuing physical perfection. The modern movement of ‘looksmaxxing’ created by Calvicular, a social media influencer and twitch streamer, is well-known for his excessive use of making his appearance utter perfection and the overindulgent ways in which he is willing to make himself look perfect. ‘Looksmaxxing’ is a practice that deliberately enhances one's physical appearance to achieve maximum attractiveness through increasingly extreme practices, ranging from skincare and fitness to hormone injections and cosmetic procedures. Looksmaxxing has spread throughout the social media realm and has made its way for those who are willing to partake in this phenomenon to better their physical attractiveness. The author points out how this fails to comprehend the true meaning behind beauty as there are numerous other factors that play a part such as whether one has social, verbal and expressive cues that play a part in how we really view attractiveness. Looksmaxxing has turned into an obsessive almost stifling formula in which people are willing to put themselves into harm's way in order for one to become the precipice of attractiveness. This essay provides an entry point in understanding how media reshapes perception, identity and embodiment.

McLuhan's argument that the ‘medium is the message’, provides a lens to understand this mediated effect on individuals who engage in looksmaxxing. It can be understood that our environments are surrounded and mainly concentrated with media platforms and society dominated by media awareness is going to shape the perception of the people. He also illustrates that there are different levels of media that people are able to participate in and how media extends human senses far beyond what the surface-level visuals they view. This relates back to looksmaxxing as from McLuhan’s teachings,  this phenomenon is not just a trend but a catalyst of the new digital media domain where social media brings about a sense of competition and comparison amongst people and restricts inner qualities of people, focusing on the external, physical aspects of the body. The body can also be seen as the medium because the way people treat their bodies is a way to measure and objectify and within this meaning, identity is reduced to visual data only. 

McLuhan uses the example of electric lightning to explain that the medium without context is just lightning, meaning it is only information. Thus, it is the context within the medium that provides the actual impact, as is the case in social media platforms. These platforms through their material, curate forms of self that are influenced by the material that viewers watch and engage with. Lookmaxxing is an example of a kind of curtating of identities where people tend to perceive beauty through the content that they are exposed to. The concept of physical appearance has a new meaning as viewers normalize having chiseled jaws and going to any lengths to achieve it so they are considered beautiful. 

Another aspect that McLuhan explains is the concept of human sensorium which is the balance and hierarchy of the senses. Visual and auditory senses help people establish a sense of reality, but the paradox is that electric media has the potential to create an artificial sense of reality. Media targets our entire sensorium and thus reshapes it where individuals develop an identity that may not be true if there was no viewing of such media. Looksmaxing is a classic example of such distorted reality which has changed the depiction of beauty standards. The body becomes a curated image which can be edited and optimized to the standards that have been set for society through such social media trends. Rothfield notes that such practices have made racism, cruelty, use of slurs and other un-imaginable acts of discrimination to become acceptable as people like Clavicular, get fame through being at the top of news feeds and dominating algorithms (2026).

The phenomenon of looksmaxxing can be understood in the realm of the 'Canadian discourse of technology’, which identifies technology as being composed of social and psychic space. The social space is the material environment of everyday interactions and social practices whereas the psychic space is related to the perceptions and shaping of cognitions in everyday life. Drawing on this concept, looksmaxxing can be understood as a system of shaping and embodiment of values that normalize constant comparison making it a social space and creating ideologies of beauty that have been constructed through the psychic space. In this trending culture of beauty standards, technology’s impact is embodied showing how individuals of society perceive themselves and our relation to others.

McLuhan helps us to better understand that looksmaxxing is not just rooted in narcissism, but in the global media environment that shapes people’s values. The media don’t reflect beauty standards, they are the ones who actively produce them. When we let the media re-shape what beauty standards are and the norms of attractiveness, in reality we lose what it means to actually be human. Looksmaxxing displays a dilemma of agency as well, where it relates to providing empowerment in the form of taking control of your physical appearance and having the right to look beautiful on the one hand but at the same time it is reshaping and conforming individuals to beauty standards that are completely constructed and have put restrictions on how people think about it. Thus, this kind of medium does not just enable action, it is actually re-structuring it. It is integral to analyze trends like looksmaxxing, through the lens of scholars like McLuhan, which provides us a way to understand the shaping of identities and perception is the new age of digital media. 

References:

Herman, A. (2026, March 30). Marshall McLuhan: The medium theory of media ecologies/environments from The Gutenberg Galaxy to Understanding Media [PowerPoint slides]. CS304B Canadian Communication Thought, Wilfrid Laurier University.

Miroshnichenko, A. (2016). Extrapolating on McLuhan: How media environments of the given, the represented, and the induced shape and reshape our sensorium. Philosophies, 1(3), 170-189.

Rothfield, B. (2026, March 7). The captivating derangement of the looksmaxxing movement. The New Yorker.

Blog Post 4 - Mya Murray (D)

When I first read Daniel Kolitz’s article on gooning, my honest reaction was just confusion. I could not understand how something so private and intimate had become so openly discussed online to the point where people joke about it, build communities around it, and treat it like some funny internet trend. The whole thing felt less amusing to me and more like a sign that digital culture has seriously changed the way people think about sexuality and intimacy.

What stood out most in the article is that gooning is not really just about pornography. It is about the entire digital environment surrounding it. Kolitz explains how this phenomenon is built on endless scrolling, overstimulation, algorithmic recommendation, and the ability to constantly switch between content without ever stopping. That is what makes it more than just an odd sexual subculture. It is a product of the way digital media is designed.

This is where I think Marshall McLuhan’s idea that “the medium is the message” becomes really useful. McLuhan argues that what matters most is not the content itself, but the form of media delivering it and how that form reshapes human behaviour. In this case, the issue is not only pornography itself. It is the digital platform, the interface, the instant access, the constant novelty, and the endless stimulation that come with it. The medium is what makes the behaviour possible in this form.

Kolitz also points out that gooning has become its own online culture with shared language, memes, and communities. What was once something private is now public, social, and even normalized. To me, that says a lot about how digital media does not just host behaviour. It turns behaviour into identity and community. Once something becomes embedded in online culture, people stop seeing it as strange or concerning and start treating it as normal.

That is what I find most unsettling about the whole thing.

To me, gooning reflects a larger issue in modern digital culture, which is the complete normalization of hypersexualization and overstimulation. We live in an environment where people are constantly surrounded by sexual content, whether through pornography, dating apps, social media, or advertising. Everything encourages instant gratification. Everything pushes desire, stimulation, and physical attraction to the front of people’s minds.

I think the long term effect of that is damaging. When people become used to consuming sexuality in such detached and overstimulated ways, it becomes harder to value intimacy for what it should be. Real connection, vulnerability, emotional depth, and even spiritual love begin to get replaced by temporary satisfaction and surface level desire. People start relating to one another more for physical pleasure than for who they actually are.

What I appreciated about Kolitz’s article is that even though he approaches the topic analytically, the piece still reveals how strange this development really is when you step back and think about it. The fact that something like this can become not only common but publicly joked about and normalized online says a lot about the kind of digital environment we live in.

At the end of the day, I do not think gooning is just another weird internet trend. I think it is a symptom of a media environment that encourages overstimulation, rewards instant gratification, and slowly changes the way people experience intimacy and connection. If McLuhan is right that media reshape us through the environments they create, then gooning is a pretty extreme example of what happens when digital media begins reshaping even our most private human experiences.

And honestly, I think that should concern people more than it currently does

Blog Post 4

When the Medium Becomes the Message: What "Gooning" Tells Us About Digital Life

    Marshall McLuhan's famous line "the medium is the message" sounds like one of those academic slogans that loses it's meaning the more and more you repeat it. But when spending just five minutes thinking about how we actually live with technology in our society today, and it starts to create an unsettling sense. McLuhan wasn't really interested in whether TV shows were relatively "good" or "bad." He more wanted to know what happens to us when we spend hours staring at glowing rectangles. How do these technologies reshape the way we see, feel, and experience the world? He called this the "human sensorium" which is basically, the complete package of how we take in reality. Which brings me to the topic of "gooning." If you haven't encountered this term, it's described in Daniel Kolitz's The Goon Squad as a kind of prolonged, trance-like engagement with online pornography. But here's what makes it interesting from a media and communications studies perspective: the shocking part isn't the sexual content. It's the form. Think about it. Previous generations had different forms of access such as, magazines, video tapes, whatever. But today's experience is built on endless scrolling, algorithmic feeds, and interfaces that are designed to keep you locked in and continuously interacting. The content almost doesn't matter to a point, what's transformative is the technological environment itself. The infinite scrolling, the instant switching, the ambient hum of notifications. That's the real architecture here. 

    McLuhan described media as an "extensions of ourselves," and gooning takes this decription literally. Participants describe entering a so called "goonstate" a kind of ego dissolution where the boundary between ones self and screen  begins to blur. Whether or not you find this behavior appealing, it's hard to deny that something neurologically interesting is happening to keep you engaged. The screen becomes an extension of the nervous system, feeding continuous visual stimulation directly into your perceptual field while everything else and our senses like touch, smell, physical presence begins to fade into background noise. This is the human sensorium getting reconfigured. Visual stimulation gets cranked up; and the other senses get dialed way down. Your cognition starts to sync with the rhythm of the feed rather than the rhythm of your body. 

    McLuhan also argued that electronic media create new forms of "tribalism" collective experiences that replace individual isolation. Gooning fits into this context weirdly well. It's not a solitary secret anymore; it's a networked practice with its own forums, memes, and even shared vocabulary. People call themselves "gooners." They joke about "goonicide." There's a whole symbolic world that is built around this behavior. This shift from private shame to communal identity is exactly what McLuhan meant when he talked about media changing "scale, pace, and pattern." The scale in this case being limitless content. The pace is instantaneous, and frantic switching. The pattern is collective rather than individual.

    There's a tradition in Canadian media theory that McLuhan, Harold Innis, and others participate in that tends to be more skeptical about technology than your average Silicon Valley evangelist. These thinkers emphasize how technologies reshape our environments in ways that we don't always notice or have the ability to control. They're interested in the unintended consequences. Gooning fits this critical tradition because it specifically highlights how digital environments don't just facilitate behavior; they condition it. The technology creates an ecology where certain habits now become not just possible but are now even normalized. You can read this as connection (finding your people) or as alienation (losing yourself in the scroll). Probably it's both. The vocabulary that emerges and consists of words like, "goonstate," "gooneral," "goonicide" demonstrating how media generates new symbolic systems that then loop back and structure our experiences. McLuhan noted that the content of one medium is always another medium. Here, the digital platform births new language, which then shapes the community's identity.

    The point isn't to moralize about gooning or internet pornography. The point is to notice how easily the medium and the interface, as well as the algorithm, and the endless scroll become the real story. McLuhan's insight was that we obsess over content (what we're watching) while remaining blind to form (how the technology is rewiring our attention, our senses, our social bonds). Whether you're analyzing gooning, TikTok, or your own inability to stop checking email, the pattern holds. The message isn't in what the screen shows you. It's in what the screen is doing to you.

Blog 4 Post: "The Captivating Derangement of the Looksmaxxing Movement,"

Learning about McLuhan and his idea that “the medium is the message,” is very interesting and honestly, the looksmaxxing movement is one of the clearest examples of what he was talking about. At first, it might just seem like a weird or extreme internet trend, however when you look at it more closely, it shows how social media is changing the way people see themselves and their bodies. The looksmaxxing movement is all about trying to improve your appearance to increase your “sexual market value.” People involved in it go to extreme lengths, like reshaping their faces, obsessing over measurements, or even doing things like “bone-smashing” to get a better jawline. It sounds insane, but what’s more interesting is why people are doing this in the first place. It’s not just about wanting to look better. It’s about how social media has changed the way we understand beauty.

This is where McLuhan’s idea really comes in. He argues that media don’t just send messages, they actually change how we experience the world. In this case, social media has made everything way more visual. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram are built around appearance, comparison, and constant exposure. Because of that, people start to see themselves differently. Instead of just being a person, you become something to look at, judge, and improve. What stood out to me is how the body gets treated almost like a project or a set of data. People aren’t just saying “I want to look good.” They’re breaking down their faces into ratios, angles and measurements. It’s like they’re turning themselves into a math problem. That kind of thinking doesn’t just come from nowhere. It comes from being in a media environment where everything is ranked, compared, and optimized.

Another thing that connects to McLuhan is the idea that media extend our senses. Social media extends our ability to see ourselves, but not in a normal way. It’s like seeing yourself through other people’s eyes all the time. You’re constantly aware of how you look, how you compare, and how you might be judged. That creates a kind of pressure where you feel like you always need to improve or fix something. This also connects to the Canadian way of thinking about technology that we talked about in class. Instead of blaming individuals, it focuses on how the environment shapes behavior. The people in the looksmaxxing movement aren’t just randomly making bad choices. They’re reacting to a system that constantly tells them that their value is based on how they look. When you’re surrounded by that kind of messaging all the time, it starts to feel normal.

However, the movement is kind of ironic. A lot of people in it claim they’re exposing the truth about beauty and showing that it’s not natural. But instead of escaping those standards, they end up creating even stricter ones. Beauty becomes something that has to be calculated and perfected, which honestly feels even more extreme than regular beauty standards. Overall, I think this movement shows just how powerful social media really is. It’s not just influencing what people think is attractive. It’s changing how people see themselves at a deeper level. The body becomes something to analyze and improve instead of just something you live in. That’s exactly what McLuhan meant when he said media change our perception and not just our ideas. In the end, looksmaxxing might seem like an extreme or niche trend, but it actually reveals something bigger. It shows how the digital media environment is shaping identity, self-worth, and even how people experience their own bodies. And honestly, that’s kind of unsettling, because it means this isn’t just about a few people online. It’s about the direction our whole media culture is heading.