Marshall McLuhan was a philosopher who dedicated a lot of his time to study Media Ecology. His theories made me recognize that some of society’s failures are due to technological advancements. Today, if you go anywhere you ill see people buried on their phones. If you visit a college campus you are bound to see multiple people on their phones completely oblivious to what is going on around them. Believe it or not, the older generation is just as bad as the younger generation. Although advancements in technologies are what keep our society moving forward, they can also be the very thing holding us back. People tend to see the entire world through their one eye, the eye of the phone and do not value in-person communication or even do their own research on important topics. They get all of their information from social media and influencers.

Media ecology is “the study of different personal and social environments created by the use of different communication technologies”(311). Although evaluating the different media ecologies can be challenging but are not impossible. You first must understand how the environments are created and how they affect the individuals using the technologies. Mr. McLuhan loved to use metaphors when he was describing the influence of media and how they can be misleading he claimed that ” For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by a burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind”(310). This is important to understand because “we focus on content and disregard the medium”(310). But when it comes down to understanding the content, it has “as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb”(310).

To correctly understand Media Ecology and how technology affects society as a whole we must understand how it is used. Media is essentially anything that man has invented that aids in the speed, range, and communication process. A medium is any kind of media but it is broken down into one specific channel, such as a book or website. This is important because it provides different perspectives and also can reveal fallacies. When studying different people and the environment they interact via technology certain traits become evident. If you focus on today’s day and age, some individuals have concluded that we have lost our interpersonal abilities while others say that technology has improved it. Yes, some have lost the ability to hold an educated conversation, but we have gained the ability to communicate over long distances and even across the world thanks to technology. By focusing on the content itself rather than the way it is communicated, part of the message is lost because the content means nothing outside of the medium or the way it is delivered. In essence, the medium is just as important if not more important than the content itself. If the content has remained constant but the medium has changed over time you know have a completely different subject even though it seems similar. The content is just the icing that makes the cake (the medium) look pretty.