Medium = Massage ?

The medium is the massage

After reading this book, two main ideas are dancing in my mind, the first is Woody Allen movie “midnight in Paris” and the second is my mother.

I’ll begin with the second. I think of my mother because she always told me that my generation is completely different from hers, she was born in 1956, she tells me about how wonderful was to grow up in this time because you can go all the afternoon to play with other kids in the block, you could play soccer and other games we have in Mexico (I don’t know the translations for this games but we have quemados (like dodge ball), la traes (a game with no sense in which you have to run from the person “who has it” if he/she touch you no “you have it” and you have to touch somebody else to get rid of it). What does this has to do with the book? That this book was written in 1967, when my mother was 9 years old, and in its pages is written that the generation growing up in that time was being completely different from the previous one due to constant impact to the media, the author of the book is saying the exact same thing that my mother told me 10 years ago when I was a kid, and this argument takes me straight to the relation with “Midnight in Paris” because in this film [SPOILER ALERT IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE MOVIE STOP, GO AND WATCH IT, THEN COME BACK] people have this nostalgia for the past in which they always want to live in a different era than the one in which they live, this happens with media; because Media, as mentioned in the book, is constantly changing and with this it affects the audience making it different, there will always be this nostalgia of a better time in which media was not has advanced as in the present day and when media was not as influential in people lives. I’m sure someday when I’m a father (hopefully in many years) I’ll complain about the same thing as my mother and the author, because I’ll think my kids are overexposed to media and this may change the way in which they grow up.

Media does affect life. And affects life because affect your environment, the way you think, the way the person sitting next to you in a restaurant thinks. These changes are everywhere, television, radio books, art and not mention internet which is already a huge change from my generation to my parents.

Technology is making the world a better, smaller and in equitative place to live, because life is easier we just have to push a couple of buttons to make some things that would have required much more time and effort to do. I come from Mexico, my family, my friends are two thousand miles away, but I can talk with them every day. My home is physically in another country, but I can communicate with them as if we were in the same city, just in two different places, that is the effect of a global village.

Personally, media is no longer a massage, Media is the spa, in 50 years has grown to be a pillar for our lives and our societies. Thinking as media a massage in 1967 as something you need to relax, to get loose for a moment and forget about other concerning is no longer valid.