As with most things on the internet, I am not going to provide any context to what I'm going to write here primarily because no one solicited it anyway. If you somehow happen to find yourself on this webpage, I invite you to read on, but do so with the knowledge that you didn't ask for what I'm about to say. I'm more or less just standing in the town square and shouting, and you happened to come by and listen in for a moment. As such you shouldn't feel compelled to finish this or think too hard about it after the fact.
It's challenging for me to be able to write about something that I have so thoroughly taken for granted that it has become invisible. It's like a fish writing about water, or Narcissus recognizing himself in the pool. The work of Marshall McLuhan is devoted to trying to expose to people this invisible property of our life, and several thinkers before and after him have pondered the same subject. Phaedrus, one of the Socratic Dialogues, describes Socrates heavily criticising written language and his prediction that it will make people forgetful and convince them they are wise. Plato, in Republic, will occasionally attack poetry, which he indicts as convincing people that good education is manifested in good imitation of a teacher. Ovid warned of being fatally captivated by an image in "Narcissus and Echo", and Nietzsche noticed a change in his writing style when he switched from the pen to the typewriter.
The "effect of media" as I crudely fashion it entails a hidden consequence of using any "extension of ourselves". This consists of every conceivable thing that is not your body. I have become captivated with this line of thought because I think we are living in remarkable times, and I believe that this line of thought rings true to a greater extent than any other on the effects of media. Nicholas Carr tries to articulate what I am talking about in "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains" as does Neil Postman in "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business"
That said I am put off by the fact I have never been able to really "click" with any of these. I haven't read Carr's book, only his article, and I only know about Postman from him being lambasted by another author, which I read about here. Despite my mystification people like McLuhan specifically formed their way of thinking around this total interdependency and therefore "somnambulism" that comes with using media. He is more interested with giving people fragments of ideas to work with rather than a cohesive and exhaustive theory, and that is enough to prove to me that anyone from any background can understand it, provided they want to see it to begin with.
I hope that if I can keep my attention span intact that this blog will become a place where I can diffuse my thoughts into a semi-functioning understanding of the effects of media, namely the internet and it's "content", as to compensate for a total lack of people in my personal life that wish to discuss it with me... not that anyone can blame them.