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