McLUHAN'S PERSPECTIVE

In McLuhan's perspective, the media has caused the violence which exists today. Young people are violent because they have been forcibly robbed of identity. He says that "violence on a colossal scale results from his feeling of impotence. The media tend to make everybody puny while offering them the opportunity to be supermen." The irony is that the media promises fame and fortune while denying them to the vast majority of people. There is a striving and reaching beyond ourselves to become more than human. "So there is a new desire to use the media to put on the colossal audience that today's media provide." Home pages on the web express man and woman's desire for identity and for world exposure like McLuhan suggested.

But as McLuhan has also suggested, being superhuman in an expanding information age seems fated to make him/her feel inadequate in this every widening world unless s/he becomes an integral part of the medium.

Conflict causes a demand for change, which is facilitated by violence. The cyborg loves change, which is seen as good; therefore, violence is good. The cyborg loves violence. In business, the phrase "entropy" is often used to discuss how a new paradigm can be built, not by adding to the current, but by knocking the current system down and rebuilding. This is a violent act that is necessary, in some cases, to realize originality.

Communication is an Act of Violence