Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of Awareness

‘The division of faculties which results from the technological dilation or externalization of one or another sense…’

Now bidirectionally visual and audible.  Even tactile.  Personally mobile and ubiquitous. Multidimensional, immersive, and nearing a fully-connected social environment–orders of magnitude beyond cold television and hot text.  All senses engaged and remixed.  Versioned and archived.  Your dilation recorded live for all to see.

‘is so pervasive a feature of the past century that today we have become conscious, for the first time in history, of how these mutations of culture are initiated.’

Is it possible the gap between those who are conscious and those who are unaware is growing?  There’s more than one gap, and each one is a perspective–some potentially dangerous.  What are the consequences?  The past century is the past five years now.

‘Those who experience the first onset of a new technology, whether it be alphabet or radio, respond most emphatically because the new sense ratios set up at once by the technological dilation of eye or ear, present men with a surprising new world, which evokes a vigorous new “closure,” or novel pattern of interplay, among all of the senses together.’

With what we are now building we should expect a radical new setup of sense ratios with a potential onset more rapid than we could ever think.  The ‘closure’ may be transformational and violent beyond our wildest dreams.  What happens when you add two-billion people to the mix almost overnight when compared to historical or geological-scale change rates?  The time between system shocks is decreasing.  Multiple shocks seem to be arriving during the lifetime of a single human.

‘But the initial shock gradually dissipates as the entire community absorbs the new habit of perception into all of its areas of work and association.’

And we’re just at the beginning of the biggest shock ever with the potential for the next one to be something that we can’t even recognize.  If we weren’t conscious of how these mutations were initiated before, it seems to follow that we won’t be able to recognize our next initiation.

‘But the real revolution is in this later and prolonged phase of “adjustment” of all personal and social life to the new model of perception set up by the new technology.’

McLuhan, M.  THE GUTENBERG GALAXY.  1966.  p. 23.

This is what worries me.