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.