Three Reasons We’re Lonely

And three responses for being less so.

Marshall McLuhan used technology to describe our world quite poignantly. He used the phrase media (which became central to his theory of Media Ecology), but the summary is that the human journey is one of experiencing the world, sensing our limitations, and extending our capabilities. A cycle begins. We extend some part of the human experience, it obsolesces another part, and then it reverses. That’s technology, or, media.

A common example would be the security camera. It extends the eye, obsolesces the security guard, and can reverse when used as an invasion of privacy.

The overarching critique of technology by McLuhan is more far-reaching, however. All of this extension, obsolescence, and reversal are constantly changing how society exists. There is a chance, then, that as technology grows, so do society’s problems. Technology has been wondrously beneficial, but as McLuhan often wonders, at what expense?

One of the original sociologists — Emile Durkheim — asked a similar question. Durkheim lived in Western Europe during the height of the industrial revolution. Unprecedented technological growth had blossomed a world utterly unfathomable to previous epochs of history. Durkheim wondered if there was a downside. What he found was that every geographical area…