Assessing McLuhan
“We shape our tools and afterwards, our tools shape us.”
While I do agree with the first part of the statement, I don’t agree with its successor. This is because I believe that at the end of the day, it is people. It is people who add to the media and people who shape people. Like a hammer, when left alone, new media is only a mere object. It takes people to use it before it can shape anything. If anything, it is people who are consciously aware of the effects of new media and uses the tools to shape others. There is a hidden part of human nature who crave attention or validity from others and uses different forms of new media to gain that. In brief, I disagree with the wording of the phrase because it blames the middle man for the front man’s actions.
However, if I ignore the wording and interpret it as the usage of the tools, then I fully agree with the statement. As stated before, people use new media to shape others. In the process, they also shape themselves. Returning to the hammer analogy, most people nowadays immediately reach for the hammer rather than bang a rock on a loose nail. The same can be said for the medium of Google. In the past, curiosity was solved by a long trip to the library that ended in hours of scouring through the aisles to find a specific piece of information. In the age of the internet and Google, a person would appease their curiosity with a quick search on google. This is an example of a small change in our behaviour as a result of new media. It suggests that there could be changes to our behaviours on a much larger scale.
Not only does new media change our behaviours but our morals and on some scale, our political ideology as well. This is why hacking during elections are heavily investigated during this day and age. New media can be used as a tool to change morals by pressuring the masses to conform to the majority. Though conformity can occur outside the effects of new media, its effects within new media extend outside of our own reality. Within social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, the scale is so large that it extends outside of what can happen in our reality. In the real world, only your right-wing neighbour convinces you about voting for a specific political candidate. Once you log onto Facebook, you are bombarded with the opinions of strangers as well. Returning to the idea of people needing validation from others, though those people are strangers, they are still people that we feel the need to impress. It is even worse in the case of hacking when the general public is unaware that the strangers are mere robots.
Other than morals, new media also act as a tool that can physically shape us. It is the driving tool of the makeup industry and the cosmetic surgery industry. Through media such as Instagram and Snapchat, our perceptions of ourselves are forced to conform to the popular definition of beauty. For Instagram, it was created as a way to share photos. However, the contents are heavily saturated with modified images and those images modify the definition of modern beauty. As a result, it physically shape us by promoting the idea of a photoshopped body and tuned face through plastic surgery or alternative shady practices. This explains why Kylie Jenner’s plastic surgeon Dr Simon Ourian has 3.6 million followers on Instagram even though he no longer has his medical license. For Snapchat, it changes our perception of ourselves through fun filters. Not only does it slim our faces but it also whitens our faces to fit the manufactured image of beauty. It shifts society’s image of beauty towards one that promotes colourism.
