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.