McLuhan: It's All Going According to Marshall's Plan

"McLuhan: It's All Going According to Marshall's Plan" by Mark Edmundson is a fantastic article with a lot of insight into our generation and the way the types of media are affecting us. Through reading about the depth experience and depth participation, I could not help myself but to think of a few of my own examples of this from 2010.

A perfect example of a role-playing game where one takes on the view and persona of an animation, is the game The Sims. With the newer versions of this game, you can actually make the Sim look so much like yourself, down to birthmarks, pimples and freckles. After creating a virtual person that can look identical to the real you, one then commands it to do things, as if they were living that life themselves. This really intrigues the player to be right in the game, as "one self-contained unit".





Another quote from the reading that reminded me of something from the 21st century was, "Some day, perhaps, a clothes shopper will be able to see, beamed into his living room, a three-dimensional image of himself in a suit before he buys" (66-67). Although I have not heard of this, I have heard of a game that allows you to upload a picture of your face, and then try on different styles and colors of hair to see how a new hairdo would look. Sounds pretty similar, and pretty scary. These interactive systems really get the player involved in the game and are extremely reflective of real life.




This all goes in hand with Edmundson's idea of perceptual numbing. With all of the types of video and computer games today, nothing phases us. If a baby is shown at two years old how to virtually play with a Dog on Nintendo DS, or is shown how to shoot people on Call of Duty at age three, by the time they are teenagers, nothing can surprise them. He is absolutely correct when he says, "...perceptual numbing may be the loss of our individual capacity to respond to anything but the most violent stimuli" (68). We have become so accustomed to the different types of games and all the violence found on them, that nothing causes a response anymore. Many kids and teenagers have a better time living their life through a virtual reality game than actually going out into the real world. And this is exactly what the biggest downfall of the 21st century generation is.