McLuhan: technology::Being

Abstract: As the names 'Facebook' and 'YouTube' suggest, we are increasingly experiencing our being via technologies of mediation. Brian Rotman has expressed this phenomenon as a process of 'becoming beside ourselves,' which suggests the displacement of fixed notions of being by processual notions of becoming, and the way in which these processes are taking us beyond defined notions of selfhood. In this paper I want to explore McLuhan's foundational theories of mediation as they pertain to the increasingly relational sense of being emerging from the mediascape, and what the implications are for our ideas of learning, taking as my point of departure McLuhan's comment that media are effecting 'an evolutionary [shift] from biology to technology' in which 'the body becomes the old hardware environment,' and 'media [the] means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.'