New Media: Trading Back the Eye for the Ear
The eye-it cannot choose but see; we cannot bid the ear be still; our bodies feel; where'er they be, against or with our will . -Wordsworth (McLuhan, 196, p. 44)
 New media is changing the way we perceive our environment; our world is no longer visually based. As Marshall McLuhan describes we now live in a world that is "boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror" (McLuhan, 1967, p. 48). New media is the anecdote to years, decades, and century influence of the phonetic alphabet and the printing press. Society is not longer a cult of individuals with fixed points of view, there is no room for detachment from new media. Everyday we are bombarded with messages, news stories, advertisements, ideas, that work us over and require our total involvement. You can now enter a website and get the latest news headlines  from around the world, along with audio and visual clips to accompany them, all at taps of a few keys and a few clicks of the mouse. Research is beginning to be done with giga upon gigabyte of information that is stored on the internet. People are vacating libraries and library catalogs, and jumping on the highway of information that is retrieved instantaneously. The instantaneous nature of the new media allows us to experience our environment instead of perceiving it. Our environment no longer has to be rational and we no longer have to develop a fixed point of view to understand it and navigate it. We simply experience it and according to McLuhan we live mythically by "putting on the audience, putting on one's environment" (McLuhan, 1967, p. 114). McLuhan suggests that new media creates an anti-environment where "'precision' is sacrificed for a greater degree of suggestion" (McLuhan, 1967 p. 114). Rationality is being replace by the myth, which is the "mode of simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects" (McLuhan, 1967 p. 114). We are immersed in the total experience of our environment, which all come together to form a supernatural existence.
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