VIOLENCE & IDENTITY
The violence that all electric media inflict on their users is that they are instantly invaded and deprived of their physical bodies and are merged in a network of extensions of their own nervous systems. As if there were not sufficient violence or invasions of individual rights, the elimination of the physical bodies of the electric media users also deprives them of the means of relating to the programmed experience of their private individual selves, even as instant involvement suppresses private identity.
The loss of individual and personal meaning via the electronic media insures a corresponding and reciprocal violence from those so deprived of their identities; for violence whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.
--Marshall McLuhan
Violence of the Media
McLuhan states that violence occurs more often when one
is struggling to find identity. If the use of the Internet is such a place where one can possess several identities, then the user, in fact, will display an amount of violence in cyberspace based on the quest for identity.
In retrospect, the self has several identities outside cyberspace. One person has an identity for public, another for private, and different identities when dealing with different people. How does this separate real life from cyberspace?
Communication as Violence
