FROM THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE TO LIVING IN THE MATRIX (THE MEDIA MATRIX)

Welcome my son, welcome to the machine.
What did you dream?
It's alright we told you what to dream.
-Pink Floyd

"In the introduction to McLuhan's Understanding Media he writes: ‘Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Like much of McLuhan's writing this statement is vast and poetic, with its strength of conviction making it quite persuasive. But if we are to be believers in this rhetoric we must have an understanding of what he means.

The underlying concept of McLuhan's view of electr(on)ic technology is that it has become an extension of our senses, particularly those of sight and sound. The telephone and the radio become a long distance ear as the television and computer extend the eye by projecting further than our biological range of vision and hearing.
-Benjamin Symes

The last few months I have been thinking more than usual about media, the electronic age, the post information age and the million ways in which our lives are now interconnected with media.

The war, the election, "reality TV" new advertising methods and paradigms(especially that of creating entire cultures based on advertising friendliness)and the internet.

All of it has led me to a conclusion. That we are no longer served by the media and we are no longer simply absorbing information. No, the information is the CULTURE now. We have gone beyond the medium is the message to the medium is the culture.

There are almost no aspects of life or atmospheres in which we live it today that have not been plotted, planned, researched and focus grouped with care to minutiae of psychological effect.

I believe we are actually living in the Matrix. Not an unseen computer program that creates our physical and mental realities. No, a Media Matrix that has now become our physical, mental, spiritual and cultural reality.

Think about the Matrix in your life. The radio wakes you up in the morning with advertising, your commute to work, your newspapers, your TV, your Internet, your governmental agencies, politicians speeches, your palm pilot, your movies, your travel brochures, ID cards, credit cards, chip implants. All have been meticulously plotted and planned by sometimes overt and sometimes shadowy groups of people and organizations to work on your deepest psychological traits, designed to move you to action and a different sense of perceptive reality.

Was the guy who claimed he was receiving mind control signals from the TV insane or simply ahead of his time?

Just HOW pervasive is it? How many people realize it exists(is it only me)? Have we reached a saturation point with open cultural rebellion on the horizon or is there room for it to grow and become even more controlling? Is there any real experience left to be had in this world?

Or are we simply a part of the media matrix that is, without much fanfare, marking the latest seismic growth spurt in human 'evolution'?