Those of you familiar with Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s 1967 ground breaking book, “The Medium is the Massage,” will notice that the title of this letter has been modified for today’s reality. In the 1967 book, the main thesis was that the medium affects how the message is received and is more important than the message itself. Back then the media were TV and radio. Now we are in a brave new world where the media have become even more ubiquitous and have become even more: the message.
In the long evolution of humans we have only been able to see and hear things farther than sight and “shouting distance” for a couple hundred years. Now distant sights and sounds are usually within arms reach. Human evaluating is a very slow process and this deluge of information overruns our ability to process it effectively. Up until recently we would see and hear things near us and we had the time to reflect on what it meant. This “soak time” is crucial for us to feel and understand the world around us and how to respond to it. Now, the media bring us so much information that we have no time to reflect and understand the message and how we feel about it. Such reflection is constantly being overrun by new info. This leaves us with a superficial understanding of the message.
Not only is our understanding of the world around us fractured, so are our relationships with people close to us. Instead of being “present” with those near us, our media often distracts with events in distant places. Learning how to be “present” with those around us and how to give ourselves the “soak time” to better understand the world is the challenge of our times.
David Hart, Torrey
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