“I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say.“

Is a blog an extension of a journal? Is text messaging the extension of a phone call? Is microblogging the hybrid of the blog and a text message? If so, what do these mediums amputate and what do they extend?

The forms of communication mentioned above are ways in which we tell narratives in our electronic global village. W. Terrance Gordon notes that McLuhan starting point in media analysis “is always the individual, because media are defined as technological extensions of the body.” The human body is a social animal and we feel the need to relate to others and by telling our narratives, we can connect and build communities. The introduction of digital communication has proved many ramifications on culture and society, though not necessarily all good or bad. Through a blog, we can read an unknown person’s intimate thoughts, we can instantly tell someone we are thinking of them without saying a word, or let a whole group of people know what’s on our mind. These mediums are our message – we are telling the world we have something to say, we can say in instantaneously, and we can say it so the whole world hears it – we are digitally enhanced.

With all the immediacy in which we can – and do – tell narratives, there is something that may be detaching us (or amputating as McLuhan would say) from realistically connecting with each other. These brief moments in which we share narratives are a cool medium; that is to say there is much we can fill in and sometime that we need to fill in to understand what is being said. Sitting down at the computer to read a blog, as insightful as it may be, provides little information about the author or the subject. Yet this medium can instantly become a hot medium when we read the ‘about me’ section, click on a link, view a picture, or leave a note. The line between virtually and actually communicating in the digital age is blurred. I don’t know if this is good or bad or nondescript.

It remains, though, that the way we communicate has changed drastically in the last 20, let alone 200 years. John Carey has stated that we can look the culture of communication is just as much through the ritual model as a transmission model. Communication is just as interesting when we think about the technology that we use – packets, sound waves, cyberspace - but the routines and procedures and what becomes of storytelling and traditions is what is behind the sociology of communication – and what makes the history of how we got to this point so damn interesting. As McLuhan notes, it is “what drives home the message.”

Listen to the Ballad of of Marshall McLuhan