

Why It’s Good that the Internet Is Changing Our Brains - canistr
http://www.good.is/post/why-it-s-good-that-the-internet-is-changing-our-brains/

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canistr
This concept is essentially what Marshall McLuhan was talking about way better
when he made his famous quote: "the medium is the message".

Quote from
([http://individual.utoronto.ca/markfederman/article_mediumist...](http://individual.utoronto.ca/markfederman/article_mediumisthemessage.htm))

>>he tells us that a medium is "any extension of ourselves." Classically, he
suggests that a hammer extends our arm and that the wheel extends our legs and
feet. Each enables us to do more than our bodies could do on their own.
Similarly, the medium of language extends our thoughts from within our mind
out to others. Indeed, since our thoughts are the result of our individual
sensory experience, speech is an "outering" of our senses - we could consider
it as a form of reversing senses - whereas usually our senses bring the world
into our minds, speech takes our sensorially-shaped minds out to the world.
But McLuhan always thought of a medium in the sense of a growing medium, like
the fertile potting soil into which a seed is planted, or the agar in a Petri
dish. In other words, a medium - this extension of our body or senses or mind
- is anything from which a change emerges. And since some sort of change
emerges from everything we conceive or create, all of our inventions,
innovations, ideas and ideals are McLuhan media.

