My Attempt at Living a Life

  So, what can we do? In my last post I was writing about the addictive nature of technology and how much of our lives are wasted in doom-scrolling and Snapchat streaks. We are new creatures, in a new environment... McLuhan Can Teach Us Some Important Stuff Remember Marshall McLuhan's laws of media? The blessing, the improvement to our life, it is also a curse. It creates a new society. "The "Laws of the Media" are observations on the operation and effects of human artifacts on man and society, since, Hass further notes, a human artifact "is not merely an implement for working upon something, but an extension of our body, effected by the artificial addition of organs;... to which, to a greater or lesser degree, we owe our civilization." ( McLuhan, M., 2017 ) Because the things we create are extensions of us, they alter us. They alter society. And because of that, when we created the internet, and smartphones, we created new versions of ourselves, and a new ...

  The New Tech Experiments We Do We never stop to ask if we should do a thing. As teachers, we experience this every day. New policies and procedures, programs, and mandates. But it is a larger problem than that. It's a human problem. We experiment without a control group. We get a new technology and we just start using it.  We just do it. We just adopt new tech and think it's the best thing ever, and we don't stop to think of the consequences. Marshall McLuhan was writing and speaking about this phenomenon for years. He discussed the tetrad of new media and how it was a blessing and a curse.  New tech always makes life better, it always replaces and obsolesces something, and it calls back to an older tech. But the biggest part of this is what I mentioned in the previous paragraph. It is a curse. Image: Columbia.edu We never stopped to think about cars, factories, suburbs, pesticides, coal, or cellphones.  Let's stop and look at one long-ago example, to illustrate th...