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Brent's McLuhan Web
Numbness
The changes from one technology (one extension of our nervous system) to
another create such intense experiences that we adopt a numbness in self
defense. Sometimes McLuhan associates this numbness specifically
with hot media:
At other times he applies this idea to any drastic change of media.
Submerging natives with floods of concepts for which nothing has prepared
them is the normal action of all of our technology. But with electric media
Western man himself experiences exactly the same inundation as the remote
native. We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate
milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that
takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual
isolation. We are as numb in our new electric world as the native involved
in our literate and mechanical culture.
Understanding Media 16
And although he thinks that this numbness protects us, he is also contemptuous
of it.
This contempt may be motivated at least partly by McLuhan's belief that
if we can stand aside from our numbness we can gain
control.