The Medium is the Massage, this particular quote speaks volumes about the message McLuhan is trying to convey. The ear does not favor any particular point of view. You cannot filter what you hear, the noises in the environment around you demand your attention whether you like it or not. Unlike visual stimuli – which have become increasingly abundant in today's age of social media consumerism – you can't shut your ears to something you don't want to hear. As McLuhan says, “We just aren’t equipped with earplugs.” So what does this mean? In a vacuum, the “world of the ear” is global and constitutes a naturally more intrusive environment than that of the other senses. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay At our most primitive base, it was once the most desirable. As a species, humans evolved to be fiercely sociable creatures in order to survive, and we would find peace in shared bonds through conversations, music, and shared choirs. For thousands of years, sound was what brought people together during leisure times. Keep your vision sharp while working, while hunting, gathering, or dodging predators, then relax and let the sounds of your surroundings engulf you in rest. This is what we have learned to value as a species, and this symmetry is what can make us feel whole. But in the modern age of televisions, billboards and cell phones, visual stimuli never stop. We locked ourselves in a box, reserved entirely for us and us alone. We choose which channels we will watch, which accounts we follow, which messages we will receive. In doing so, we created a perfectly personalized entertainment echo chamber. While our natural instinct pushes us towards the meritocracy of sound, we opt instead for what is more comfortable. In leisure, we now only see what we want to see, and any deviation from this norm elicits angry comment or churn in an effort to keep our environment exclusive to our exact preferences. Perhaps only time will tell us what will cause this deviation from our instinctive behavior. McLuhan published this work in 1967, but his tone and his introspective look at our society seem straight out of a dystopian Generation Z hit. And yet here we are, more than 50 years later, and even if the Modern culture still elicits the same "the end is near" projections for the future, whether or not this is actually the dystopia that generations before us claimed is completely subjective. But the message McLuhan wanted to convey may not be the apocalyptic analysis that millennials and Gen Z are so accustomed to from our elders. Basically, McLuhan was an observer. His conclusions drawn from modern media were written without any prejudice or bias. McLuhan simply gave an outside analysis of human nature and how it mixes with the media we consume. A trend toward personalized visual stimuli and a move away from the common auditory environment is not in itself a bad thing for the individual or society, and McLuhan did not explicitly describe it as such. Imagine this: each of us has a borderless world at our fingertips - a completely personalized environment where seemingly endless sources of information, entertainment and conversation.