MEDIA SCIENCE 100
WHEN FEELING REPLACES KNOWING
How Electric Culture Turns the Informed Public into the Involved Tribe
Miriam Mattova recently observed on i24NEWS that social media has become less a source of news than a source of emotion. But why is society increasingly judging reality by what it feels rather than what it knows?
Professor McLuhan taught that the medium, not its content, reshapes society by altering the ratios of our senses. My work in Technology Ecology™ examines how electric circuitry shifts our sensory matrix toward tactile and proprioceptive involvement. Change the dominant sense and you change how the mind apprehends information, and consequently how society judges what is real.
In the global theatre, there are no spectators, only actors. Spectators observe; actors feel. Electric technology retrieves tribal consciousness, where collective participation and emotional belonging increasingly displace independent judgment. The informed public reverses into the involved tribe.
Society does not consciously choose emotion as its definition of reality. The technological environment conditions perception while its participants remain numb to its effects. This is the Narcissus error at the heart of the TECHNOTRAP™.
The danger is not that we feel. It is that we increasingly mistake what we feel for what we know. Counter-Propaganda Science™ begins by making that invisible technological environment visible.
Nelson S. Thall