Cyber bullying: Technology and McLuhan

Cyber bullying: Technology and McLuhan

The cruel mob pursued 13 year old Megan Meier through our high tech “social networking site MySpace and called Megan a liar, a fat ***** and worse”.

McLuhan has stated that all technology is an extension of a human faculty. The ‘bomb is an extension of the fist’ is a simple example.

“The Medium is The Message” is the phrase that made Marshall McLuhan famous. It is a phrase most of us, young and old, have heard. Until recently this was a mysterious phrase that left me speechless.

Megan, 13, fought back, but she was overwhelmed.

Let’s get very fundamental here and go back to the invention of the alphabet to understand what McLuhan is talking about and why it is important.

“The Greek myth about the alphabet was that Cadmus, reputedly the king who introduced the phonetic letters into Greece, sowed dragoon’s teeth, and they sprang up armed men. Like any other myth, this one capsulates a prolonged process into a flashing insight. The alphabet meant power and authority and control of military structures at a distance. When combined with papyrus, the alphabet spelled the end of the stationary temple bureaucracies and the priestly monopolies of knowledge and power.”

“The phonetic alphabet is a unique technology…This stark division and parallelism between a visual and an auditory world was both crude and ruthless, culturally speaking. The phonetically written sacrifices worlds of meaning and perception that were secured by forms like the hieroglyphs and the Chinese ideogram. These culturally richer forms of writing, however, offered men no means of sudden transfer from the magically discontinuous and traditional world of the tribal word into the cool and uniform visual medium.”

“All of these forms [pictographic and hieroglyphic] give pictorial expression to oral meanings. As such, they approximate the animated cartoon and are extremely unwieldy, requiring many signs for the infinity of data operations of social action. In contrast, the phonetic alphabet, by a few letters only, was able to encompass all languages.”

“She felt there was no way out,” Ms. Meier said.

Consider the invention of the printing press and the introduction of books to the society. A book communicates a message. Many books communicate many messages. ‘The book’ communicates the same message to everyone who comes into contact with the book. The book transmits the same message to everyone while many books transmit many different messages to many different people.

Evolution moves very slowly. We adapt to our environment very slowly. We survive because we do adapt. When we change more quickly than we can adapt we face problems that we have not had the time to make the kind of adjustments necessary.

The habits we acquire determine our state of mind. Our changing habits are part of this process of adaptation to our environment. Do not think of environment as being just the quality of our air or water but it is a broad term signifying the world we live in.

So we have changed very dramatically our habits that were part of us when we knew little and understood much. I am speaking relatively here. What happens to us as a result of this dramatic change? I do not know but I only point to the fact as worth consideration.

Examine how we sit and watch TV for several hours everyday. When we watch TV we are constantly being transported perceptively from one scene to another. Think for a minute if instead of sitting and watching TV we were physically escorted done a hallway with many doors. Then we open a door and are physically placed into this world we see on TV. Our reaction would be very different. In other words we are creatures prepared for a certain world that no longer exists. This is the definition of a forthcoming extinction if we think about the meaning of evolution.

“Mom, they’re being horrible!” Megan said, “sobbing into the phone when her mother called. After an hour, Megan ran into her bedroom and hanged herself with a belt.”

Has our technology become our master? I think so.

This story about Megan by Christopher Maag, “When the Bullies Turned Faceless” was published in the December 17 edition of the NYTimes.



What did the little bird say to the big bird?

Peck on someone your own size.

 

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The Medium is the Massage
was actually what he said and it was the title of his book, though, of course, the message that the medium is the message was implicit in his ideas.

The internet certainly allows anonymous aggression on a scale and ease of use unknown before.

It also allows the meek to feel into being strong and the powerful to be faced with the wrath of the meek and the shy.

More of what was hidden is revealed.

We need to develop social educational strategies to protect especially children from how this tool will be used.

I think it is good in general that an outlet has formed. This is not to deny that it will be misused, as the phone and even letters have been to harrass and torture people, sometimes even driving them to suicide. I am sure letters have done this going back hundreds and hundreds of years.

I am as Luddite as the next guy. I hope this technological phase is a transient one - in the form it has now. But I think, in general it is good that we have this outlet where we can anonymously take on the role of more confident people and sometimes say the things that need to be said to people who have never even had to listen before. Who could dominate a town, a meeting, a company, a social group in any media.

 

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I suspect that technology is like a virus. We must become a good deal more sophisticated intellectually in order to control it rather than having it control us as it now does. We are very good at the kind of reasoning demanded by technology but very inadequate with reasoning required to learn to live together.

 

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Sticks and stones, ....

 

I agree. And here we are communicating via the virus. And I assume you plan to continue to communicate via the virus. The advantage you have is that you do not need to convince anyone that you ideas will make you money, at least not at this stage. A neo-luddite book or even article has market pressures on it and the latter advertisers (with their technological products or production lines) to be offended.
Here you can, despite your marginal status, seek to jab at the center of the beast.

 

There certainly are people who don't give a shit about what people say about them. And they tend to have certain skills and ways of participating in a society. Others who tend to be more sensitive tend to have other skills and ways of participating in society.

I'm glad both kinds of people exist, so I do feel protective of the latter group.

 

I think the crucial thing here is that this written medium makes it so painfully obvious how much we actually depend on verbal and conceptual reasoning - how our lives revolve so much about our ideas of life and of ourselves and others.
This dependance is many people's weakest spot.

 

Good point.
(and speaking of viruses.)

 

Your mistake is describing the technology as the virus and not humanity.
A rock is only a rock, but in human hands it might become a weapon.

All this particular technology does is allow humans to be what they truly are without any real fear of repercussion.
Humanity already has the reasoning allowing it to live together. The internet, however, has provided the freedom to move outside the confines of what might be considered "normal" human interaction.

And the human animal reveals itself for what it is.

 

Adding the word "cyber" to something does not make it a new thing. Bullying is, has been and will probably always be a problem. Schools need to punish those responsible and social networking sites should have a well thought out "report" feature with minimum potential for abuse, ie, so that the maximum amount of bullying messages/pages are deleted while the minimum of innocent stuff is caught as false positives.

 

But there are new aspects to it created by the anonymity that the net provides. In this case, for instance, the bullier wasn't even a student but rather the mother of another girl who was pretending to be a teenage boy online & the school wouldn't have been able to anything even if they could have identified who was doing the bullying.

 

Yeah it amazes me how quick people are to lash out on the internet as soon as they realise there's no real or meaningful form of retribution out there to make them answer to their own actions.
If anything the internet for me is just further proof that anarchistic social models dont work.
People really do need policing and keeping in check otherwise you get this culture of amorality quickly surfacing.
I suppose its all abit of a wakeup call, a reminder that people really are only holding it all together by implicit virtue of what would happen to them if they let it all spill out.

Its a really interesting topic anyway, i keep meaning to dig out some papers on internet interaction, but ive only read odds and sods here and there.
Im intrigued in particular by how very specific cultures seem to grow up around certain forums.
With every forum out there there's almost like an unspoken local protocol going on, something similar to a national character i suppose.
Weirdly I often find myself writing differently depending on what forum im posting on too.

 

Yes. Posting on the internet can be a wake-up call.
Sometimes, I will find myself all worked up over something I read or wrote - and eventually, I become aware of how much I depend on words to make sense of my experience of life.

For the same to happen IRL, takes more attention because IRL, our senses are bomabred with all sorts of other information and this distances us from realizing this dependance.

In this sense, the internet is quite the challenge to face up with our weaknesses, dependencies and demons.

 

I think there is illusory anonymity. Of course it is likely no one will figure out who you are. But to write something one actually cares about - even a nasty jab at someone - is like extending a small portion of yourself into a particular environment.

You come back later and you find out how that part was treated. Was it respected? was it spat on? demeaned? misunderstood?

I am quite sure some people - perhaps more that in face to face encounters - can do this and not feel anything personally when these pieces of themselves get responded to in these ways.

On the other hand I think many do feel a serious impact, later on when they check in, and even, sometimes when they are away, not having checked yet, but feeling their post out there, perhaps dangling in front of personalities they know, to some extent, will not treat it nicely.

In this context of course we can see this as simply related to 'victims', the ones on the receiving ends of abuse, but I think it also can affect the 'abusers' too when they find their attack was dismissed, ignored, consensus-looked down on, and so on. I am sure many never look back just as out in the real world, but I do think some of this anonymity and safety is illusory.

You wanna touch, you open yourself to being touched back. And some of them are probably accumulating rather unpleasant piles of suppressed bad feelings about how they are responded to.

 

I've been thinking how the internet -with all the forums, blogs etc.- is a kind of collective conscious+subconscious, something fully personal, yet expected to be treated as if it were impersonal.

Interestingly, even though this is "just the internets", its effects can be just as real (or even more) than those from RL communication.

 

Personally, I don't care about the cyber bullying topic, but I do find the meat of the opening post interesting. The bits on language. I'd comment more, but would be off topic.

Just a couple of things.

Is this your own work, Coberst? You mention an article from the New York Times, but is that just the bolded sections with your own work interspersed in between? If so, nice.

Second.

Actually, although off topic, language is more of a virus than the technology (or humans). Language is a self-assembling code which transmits itself quite successfully amongst our species. We are its hosts. It could be said that it is a symbiotic relationship, yet often it would seem that language is the dominant partner while we are merely the medium.

Hmm.

Interesting tangent on the technology is that it could be formed into a new host for the language virus.

Anyway. Off-topic. I know. Continue with your talk of all the poor victims and whatnot.

 

All that because of technology? Bullying happens all of the time on myspace. I knew a girl at my school that was harassed and called a slut on myspace. Are some people just that dumb to go hang themselves after what they saw on their myspace page?

 

I think sowhatifit'sdark made some good points, particularly in regards to the dynamic of the 'abusers'.
Ive found that the people who tend to get very aggressive and hyper-critical of other personalities (personas?) on the internet, tend to invest the most time out of anyone else in the creation and appropriation of ad hoc defense mechanisms.
Probably the most popular of which will already be known to most as 'youre just pixels on a screen to me', and of course the other popular dictum already mentioned, 'hey, its just the internet!'.
within both of those statements i think what youre witnessing is a very public attempt to subtract the 'humaness' from human online interaction, exclusively imployed as a means to protect the ego of the 'assailant' who is causing the potential harm or mischief.
It makes sense in a warped kind of way; If your humanity is forcefully stripped away from you, then in effect no slight has been commited, and of course there's no guilt to be experienced at the abuser's end.

Certainly to highlight the absurdity further, you could apply the same logic to the 'real-world' and imagine one person telling another - 'hey, youre just atoms in potential vacum to me, sorry!'.
When you engage in those reductionist games youre also playing the game of self-denial by default - rejecting the entirity of what you know to be there.

 

It's not the result of dumbness
We are social animals We are brought up to hope for, expect, feel validation from, etc. the opinions of others. When this 'feeling into' others comes in contact with a lot of harsh judgements we naturally feel bad - some more than others. Some people are naturally more hooked in emotionally than others. These people will have certain skills and interests that are different from others who more easily brush off the opinions of others. But they tend to contribute a lot to society, having people skills and insight and empathy.

The internet also allows a very rapid 'fame' at least, for example, in a school. Sure gossip could travel fast in the past, but now it crosses social groups and is instantaenous. The source of gossip is more anonymous. Suddenly everyone in school thinks you are _______________(sleeping with your teacher, bulimic, giving blow jobs, masturbating to picture of __________)

Famous people often use drugs and weird social patterns (entourages) to maintain their sanity and enough self-compusure to keep getting on stage or whatever. It is a challenge for the social animals system to find itself - especially suddenly - the object of a lot of judgements - hell, even good ones can be shocks to the system.

 

Actually the bit about the teenager was just to get people to read the OP. My real topic of interest is about McLuhan and the meaning of his work as defined in his book "Understanding Media". In my opinion McLuhan has great insight and reading his stuff is tuff going but well worth the effort. My work in this OP is taken from McLuhan's insight. Basically McLuhan's message is that "The Medium is the Message".