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.

Blog Post 4

 Looksmaxxing and the Reshaping of Beauty

    What does it mean when people start treating their own faces like something to be engineered? The looksmaxxing movement, popular by influencer Clavicular might seem like an extreme pursuit of beauty but it reveals something that is much deeper about the influence of social media. When looking at Clavicular and the looksmaxxing movement from McLuhan's idea that the medium is the message, the movement can be understood as a set of harmful practices and the product of the digital environment a lot of us live in. When McLuhan argues that the media reshapes how we act, think and perceive the world this helps us understand that social media creates a system of constant visual comparison where bodies are reduced to measurements, rankings and sexual market value. This way looksmaxxing is now about how digital media transforms the body into something to be optimized, controlled and reworked instead of being about individual choice. 

    This idea becomes even clearer when looking at how the movement operates in everyday digital spaces. I have personally come across Clavicular’s content on TikTok and through that exposure, the logic of looksmaxxing feels less distant and more normalized. A friend of mine even knows someone who appears in his livestreams, and while he noted that Clavicular’s online persona is more exaggerated, he is still deeply invested in rating faces and breaking them down through mathematical measurements. This reflects McLuhan’s argument that media alter the balance of the senses, shaping how individuals perceive and interpret the world. This way social media prioritizes visual data, encouraging people to see themselves and others as images that can be analyzed, compared and improved. The body is no longer experienced in a embodied way but instead through a detached, calculated perspective shaped by the digital environment. 

    The looksmaxxing movement also reflects a key idea in Canadian communication which focuses on the unintended consequences of media environments and the wats they shape human behavior beyond our control. In his Playboy interview, Marshall McLuhan explains that people often remain unaware of the psychic and social effects of new technologies.(McLuhan, 1969) In the case of looksmaxxing this is shown through the normalization of extreme and harmful practices like bone smashing to alter facial structure and even the promotion of drug use like microdosing methamphetamines to maintain a certain appearance. While these actions may appear to be individual choices, they are shaped by the pressures of the media environment where users feel compelled to modify themselves to meet digital standards. This shows the bigger consequence of social media than instead of just expressing identity, individuals begin to restructure their bodies and behaviors in response to technological systems they do not fully recognize or control.  

    To better understand the looksmaxxing movement it can be understood through McLuhan's idea that the content of any medium is always another medium, which challenges the assumption that trends like looksmaxxing originate purely within social media. This is seen in the contrast between looksmaxxing and older ideas of beauty, like the concept of jolie laide, which describes individuals who are considered attractive because of their unconventional or asymmetrical features. (Rothfeld, 2026) While this earlier understanding of beauty values uniqueness and imperfection, social media reorganizes these ides into a system based on measurements and numerical ranking. By doing this the medium introduces a new scale which changes how beauty is understood and evaluated. This can be seen in the way appearance is increasingly quantified, measured and compared across digital platforms. The result is a new and simplified version of existing ideas where complexity is reduced in favour of optimization. This demonstrates how social media transforms cultural ideas into extreme forms, shaping behavior in ways that reflect the logic of the medium. 

    Clavicular’s content also reflects what Marshall McLuhan describes as the way media “works over and saturates and molds and transforms every sense ratio” (McLhan, 1969, pg. 238) , particularly in how it reshapes perception.Clavicular teaches his audience to see faces differently, breaking them down into angles, proportions and numerical values. In the article, his focus on rating systems and measurements demonstrates a way of looking that prioritizes calculation over subjective experience. This suggests that social media influences what people think is attractive and changes how they visually process and interpret the human face. 

    The looksmaxxing movement shows how deeply social media shapes cultural standards of beauty and the way individuals experience their bodies. Through Marshall McLuhan’s ideas, it shows that this movement is about appearance or self improvement and the influence of the medium. From the normalization of extreme practices to changes in perception and beauty standards, looksmaxxing reflects the influence of digital media environments. Clavicular and his followers demonstrate how people begin to think and behave according to the logic of the platforms they engage with. Lookmaxxing highlights McLuhan’s idea that media actively shapes reality.

McLuhan, M. (1969). The Playboy interview: Marshall McLuhan. Playboy Magazine.

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

Blog Post 4 - Resource A

    Charlie Warzel’s “Doomscrolling Is Over” is a perfect example of why Marshall McLuhan still matters. Warzel describes World Monitor, a website that pulls together more than 100 live streams of information, from stock prices and weather alerts to satellite movements and TV news feeds. He calls it “information overload presented as intelligence,” which captures what is so fascinating and unsettling about the site. It is not just a place to find information. It creates an environment where users feel like they need to keep watching, refreshing, and “monitoring the situation.” That is exactly the kind of media effect McLuhan wanted people to notice. This blog asks us to think about McLuhan’s interest in the “psychic and social consequences” of media, and World Monitor is a strong example of that. McLuhan’s phrase “the medium is the message” means that the biggest effects of a medium come not from its content, but from the way it changes the scale, pace, and pattern of experience. The ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. In other words, the real significance of World Monitor is not any one piece of information on the screen. It is the experience of being surrounded by everything at once.

    That is what makes the site feel so McLuhanesque. World Monitor turns the browser into a permanent command center. The user is no longer reading the news one story at a time. Instead, they are dropped into a digital space where war, markets, weather, infrastructure, and breaking headlines all appear at once. That matters because when everything shows up together, it starts to feel the same. A military conflict, a market drop, and a flight delay all become signals on the same dashboard. The form of the site flattens them into one constant feeling of urgency.

    This is where McLuhan’s idea of the sensorium becomes useful. World Monitor does not just give users more facts. It changes how they pay attention. It encourages scanning instead of reflection, reaction instead of interpretation, and constant alertness instead of sustained thought. You are not calmly learning about events one by one, you are absorbing crisis as a background condition. In that sense, the site does not just show an unstable world. It teaches users to experience instability as normal.

    Warzel’s article also connects closely to McLuhan’s 1951 letter to Innis. In that letter, McLuhan says that modern media move away from the communication of thoughts or feelings as concepts and toward a direct participation in an experience. The site does not simply tell users about instability. It pulls them into it. The user becomes part of the flow, constantly checking, scanning, and reacting. That is why Warzel’s phrase “monitoring the situation” feels so important. It describes more than a habit. It describes a way of being shaped by media. What makes this even more interesting is that monitoring feels like control. The site gives users the sense that if they just keep watching, they will stay informed and prepared. But that feeling is misleading. The user is not really gaining control over events, they are adapting themselves to the logic of the medium, always alert and waiting for the next update. The medium rewards attention, but it makes deeper understanding harder.

    What Warzel’s article makes clear is that digital media do not just deliver more content. They change how reality is felt and processed. That is why McLuhan is still useful here. World Monitor is not simply a website full of information. It is a media environment that trains users to experience the world as permanent, simultaneous crisis. That, more than any one headline or data point, is its real message.

McLuhan, M. (1995). Essential McLuhan (E. McLuhan & F. Zingrone, Eds.). BasicBooks.

Warzel, C. (2026, March 14). Doomscrolling is over. Now everyone is “monitoring the situation.”

Blog Post #4 - Resource C

 The article Love in the Time of A.I Companions by Anna Wiener looks at how people are forming emotional and even romantic relationships with AI. What stood out to me is how real these relationships feel to users, even though they know they are talking to a machine. One user even says that loneliness doesn't have to exist anymore because "there is always an A.I. waiting" to make them feel better. While the article presents this in an understanding way, I think it doesn't fully question what this actually means for human relationships in the long run. 

Using McLuhan's idea that "the medium is the message," the important part here is not just that people are using these AI, but how the medium itself is shaping what relationships look like. AI companions are always available, always responsive, and is designed to support the user. That completely removes things conflict, disagreements, or unpredictability, which are normally part of a real relationship. So the "message" of this medium is that relationships become controllable and personalized, instead of something that involves two real people. That's a big shift and I don't think the article fully challenges how artificial that kind of connection really is. This also connects to the idea of the human sensorium, where technology reshapes how we experience emotions. In the article, people use AI to deal with grief, loneliness, and everyday stress. At first, this seems helpful, but it also changes how people process these emotions. Instead of working through loneliness by connecting with others, AI provides an easier alternative that doesn't require vulnerability or risk. Over time, this could make real human interaction feel more difficult or unnecessary, which is concerning. 

We also see how technology isn't neutral, it shapes society and reflects existing problems. The article shows that AI companions are growing because of things like isolation and loneliness, but instead of fixing those issues, we have technology that adapts and finds a way to profit from it. The tools and apps are designed to keep users engaged, which means encouraging emotional attachment. That's why the AI are often supportive or even romantic, because that keeps people coming back. AI companions don't really solve loneliness, it just manages it in a way that benefits the companies behind it. 

The article does good job showing how real these AI relationships can feel, but I think its a bit too accepting of them. It doesn't really question what happens when people start relying on something that can't actually think or feel back. At some point, it stops being a connection and becomes more like a "yes man" relationship, where there is no true reciprocity. 

Blog post 4: AI love or deception?

    What exactly constitutes love and comfort? This is the question that Anna asks in her article on the relationships that people have formed with AI. But while her work is well written and immensely personal, I found her work to be at the same time to be uncritical of something so harmful. 

    Before we get into the flaws of Anna's article, we need to talk a little bit about McLuhan and media theory. AI is undoubtedly a new form of media, one that produces messages and holds a deeper meaning behind its use. Media are an extension of society, one that reflects or begins a change in how we as people operate on a daily basis. McLuhan focuses mainly on how media objects carry consequences that are able to amplify existing social processes and change or amplify the scale that it occurs on. To simplify all of that, the medium itself is a message that says something about society and where its heading to or from. The important thing this teaches us then, is to think about media as a part of the society that their in as a sort of nexus or center of cultural information. With this sort of idea we can begin to understand what exactly AI is in reference to the chatbots in Anna's article.

    AI and LLM's are algorithms, little backboxes filled with information that they use to guess the most likely next response. To give an example, its like the auto complete function on your phone but much faster and adapted to a specific purpose. Photo AI goes pixel by pixel till it creates a thing most likely to be like your prompts. Language AI synthesizes sentences most like the requested information in a prompt. Character AI is an evolution of this, its a chat bot someone has pre-"programmed" to act and speak like a certain character based on a set of available references. Its easy to think of this creation progress as guessing, but its better to think of it like a scientific hypothesis: somewhat guided in one direction, but corrected over a series of numerous tests. All of this is to say that the end product of a chat bot is not a thinking machine but a predestined static output of carefully selected information. They are unchanging and that's something that lies in the background of Anna's article. 

    Anna's article is deeply driven by the idea of loneliness among the people interviewed, they are all isolated emotionally from others and seeking a way to vent about their insecurities. It seems obvious that people in these places would turn to stories as a way to vent their emotions and character AI lets them do this first hand with their favorite option. But it also holds a twist, the "programmers" of these AI understand that the audience is lonely and use this to their advantage. The AI then become endlessly sexual, affirming, or amplifying of beliefs. We see the effects of this in Anna's article many times with Geralt of Rivia's sexual selfies or with the Replika users whose AI can't help but to propose so swiftly. Because of how static these are, its not very surprising that some users have taken on 3 AI husbands at a time, when one becomes boring you might as well find a new one.

    Lets bring this back to McLuhan, because I think there is a fairly obvious cost that this way of replacing human interaction comes with. We can think of the base problem that these AI effects as the growing loneliness epidemic we tend to see online in forums like Reddit. These people are lacking in ways to vent their frustration, but AI is no therapist its a repetitive yes man. That's why we deal with fringe cases where AI helps its user take their own life, they do not carry a sense of morality, only the objective to compliment the user. Perhaps this all started because these users were afraid of conflict in their own lives, to come to terms with loss or a fear of rejection from others. But by using these software's, they have unknowingly amplified this by further secluding themselves in their own ideas. They have become more secluded and in some ways at further risk of harm. 

    To me it seems like the risks of this tool is pretty clear, but I'm open to being wrong on this. Do you think that this character AI stuff is as alienating as I do? Does this pose a risk to users who rely on it? Is this the future that the company executives were talking about and should we just accept it?

Blog Post 4- Resource A

        Charlie Warzel’s “Doomscrolling is Over” is a great example of McLuhan’s medium theory, as the article shows that digital media does not just deliver information. They create an entire environment that reshapes how people experience the world. In class, we talked about how McLuhan sees media as environments not just tools, and how each medium changes the “ratio” between the senses. A medium does not just communicate content. It reorganizes perception, and awareness. That idea fits Warzel’s discussion of World Monitor perfectly. The site uses live feeds, risk meters, maps and crisis indicators and uses them for constant scanning and updating. What matters is not the single story on the screen, but the overall effect the medium leaves. The user is trained to experience reality as information overload and real-time alertness.

McLuhan’s medium theory of the human sensorium is especially important here. The powerpoint explains that when a new medium gives “new stress or ascendancy” to one of our senses, “the ratio among all of our senses is altered” and as a result “we no longer feel the same.”(Herman, 6) World Monitor shows this perceptual change. This is what McLuhan means when he says the medium is the message. The important issue is not just what information World Monitor provides, but the new scale, pace, and pattern it introduces into everyday life. The interface makes users feel like they need to stay plugged into a constant stream of updates, which changes how crisis is experienced on an emotional and perceptual level. The medium itself becomes the source of the article’s meaning. This moves users toward a hyper-visual, fast-moving experience, where attention is constantly fragmented across dashboards. The article reflects McLuhan’s argument that the media reshapes the conditions of knowing themselves.

This article also connects well to the Canadian discourse of technology that we discussed in class. According to the slides, this discourse argues that technology is constitutive of both social space and psychic space. Social space means the material environment of everyday interactions. The psychic space refers to perceptions and emotion. Warzel’s article shows both of these ideas. Socially, digital platforms create a culture where people feel pressured to remain constantly connected to crises and updates. Psychically, this produces a lot of anxiety and overstimulation which also shows a false sense of control. Instead of treating technology as neutral, the article reflects the more critical Canadian tradition that Innis and McLuhan about how media environments reorganize power and everyday life.

I also think that this article also matches McLuhan’s point that in electronic media we move away from focusing on the meaning of a message and toward the total effect of a medium. World Monitor is not powerful because of one headline. It is powerful because of the total atmosphere it creates. The atmosphere is saturated and strangely addictive. So the real message of the medium is not the news itself. It is the transformation of consciousness that happens when people start to live inside an interface of endless crisis monitoring. That is why “Doomscrolling Is Over” feels like such a good example of McLuhan's thought. It shows how digital media reshapes the human senses and creates new psychic and social environments.

Resources

Herman, A. (2026, March 30). Marshall McLuhan: The medium theory of media ecologies/environments from The Gutenberg Galaxy to Understanding Media [PowerPoint slides]. CS304 Canadian Communication Thought, Wilfrid Laurier University.

Innis, Harold A. “The Bias of Communication.” The Bias of Communication, University of Toronto Press, 1951, pp. 33–60.

McLuhan, M. (2013). Understanding media: The extensions of man. Gingko Press.

Warzel, Charlie. “Doomscrolling Is Over.” The Atlantic, 14 Mar. 2026.

Blog Post 4 - Resource B

 Looksmaxxing and the Message of the Medium

Marshall McLuhan argues that the "personal and social consequences of any medium result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves." More than a theory of content, this is a claim about how media reshape perception, embodiment, and social life at a fundamental level. The New Yorker article on the looksmaxxing movement illustrates this precisely. The issue is not simply that social media contains extreme beauty advice. Rather, the digital medium itself reshapes how users perceive the body, judge attractiveness, and assign social value. Looksmaxxing shows that media do not just communicate ideas about beauty; they reorganize perception and embodiment by turning beauty into something technical, measurable, and endlessly improvable.

McLuhan insists that what matters is not the content a medium carries but "the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs." This helps explain why looksmaxxing is more than a collection of strange or disturbing posts. Platforms built around scrolling, posting, comparing, and rating extend vision and self-surveillance, encouraging users to experience their own faces and bodies as visible problems to be managed and optimized. The real message of the medium, then, is not grooming advice itself but the creation of a new relation to the body grounded in constant comparison and bodily discipline.

This connects directly to McLuhan's theory of the human sensorium. Media alter the ratios among the senses, and visually dominant media shift experience toward sight. McLuhan contrasts visual space with acoustic space, arguing that vision emphasizes surfaces, distance, and objectification. Looksmaxxing reflects this visual logic clearly. Its language of jawlines, facial ratios, and sexual market value treats the body as something to inspect from the outside rather than live in from within. The face becomes a visible surface to be evaluated, ranked, and modified, with embodiment reduced to appearance and measurable traits. This is precisely the "new scale" McLuhan describes: not just new content, but a fundamentally reorganized way of inhabiting and perceiving one's own body.

The article also exemplifies what the course frames as the Canadian discourse of technology: the idea that technology is constitutive of both social space and psychic space, actively shaping social relations and everyday perception. Looksmaxxing is not simply a trend that exists on social media. It is a media environment that structures how people think about desire, attractiveness, and personal worth. Sarah Sharma deepens this point by arguing that technology is a structuring form of power that shapes the social experience of gender, race, class, and sexuality. That matters here because the looksmaxxing movement is openly misogynistic and hierarchical. It does not merely reflect unequal power. It helps reproduce and intensify it through digitally mediated practices of ranking, comparison, and bodily control.

What makes looksmaxxing significant, then, is not only its extremity. It demonstrates how digital media environments reshape the senses, the body, and social relations in exactly the way McLuhan describes. The medium is the message because the deeper effect of this media form is to train users to see themselves and others through competitive and technical visual logics. Looksmaxxing is therefore a powerful example of what McLuhan called the "psychic and social consequences" of media: not just ideas transmitted through a platform, but a wholesale transformation in how people perceive themselves and one another.

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.

McLuhan, M. (2013). Understanding media: The extensions of man. Gingko Press.

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

Sharma, S. (2022). Introduction: A feminist medium is the message. In R. Singh & S. Sharma (Eds.), Re-understanding media: Feminist extensions of Marshall McLuhan (pp. 1–19). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478022497-003

Blog Post #4 - Resource A

    Charlie Warzel’s article “Doomscrolling Is Over” presents World Monitor as more than just another news website. By combining maps, webcam feeds, headlines, market data, and other live indicators on a single screen, it turns the browser into what feels like a “makeshift situation room.” What makes this article so useful for thinking through Marshall McLuhan is that the site’s importance lies less in the individual stories it shows than in how it changes the user’s experience of the world. World Monitor creates a habit of constant watching and scanning, which makes it a strong example of the “psychic and social consequences” of media that McLuhan is interested in.

    This connects to McLuhan’s idea that media are not just channels for delivering information but environments that shape experience. The course describes media as forms that create the conditions of individual and social being, and that is exactly what World Monitor does. Instead of encouraging slow reading or reflection, the site places the user inside a constant stream of simultaneous updates. You are not meant to focus deeply on one event. You are meant to keep monitoring. In that sense, the user becomes less of a reader and more of a watcher or scanner of global instability.

    World Monitor also fits McLuhan’s medium theory of the human sensorium. The March 30 slides explain that for McLuhan, a medium is an extension of a human sense or faculty, and that media alter the “ratios” among the senses. That idea works especially well here because World Monitor clearly privileges sight. It is built around maps, feeds, dots, screens, and data that ask the user to visually track events from a distance. The result is a very visual relationship to the world, where reality appears as something to scan and monitor rather than something directly lived through. In this sense, the site extends sight and trains a form of constant visual attention.

    This also helps explain McLuhan’s claim that “the medium is the message.” As the assignment quote explains, the message of a medium is the “change of scale or pace or pattern” it introduces into human affairs. World Monitor changes the scale of perception by compressing global crises and infrastructures into one interface. It changes the pace of experience by making information feel immediate and continuous. It changes the pattern of experience by making the world appear as a permanent field of alerts, risks, and updates rather than as separate events that can be understood one at a time. Its message is not any single headline. Its message is the normalization of monitoring itself.

    This is also why the article reflects what the slides call the Canadian discourse of technology. The March 30 lecture explains that this discourse sees technology as constitutive of both social space and psychic space. World Monitor shapes social space by placing the user inside a technologically organized view of world crisis. It shapes psychic space by encouraging a mindset of vigilance, simultaneity, and ambient instability. Warzel’s article shows that digital media do not simply tell us what is happening in the world. They reshape the form in which the world appears to us. That is what makes World Monitor such a strong example of McLuhan.