We Have Become Disincarnate Beings

And it hinders our relationships.

A number of weeks ago now I wrote about nostalgia and an interview from 1977 with Canadian philosopher and media ecologist Marshall McLuhan. I promised you one more newsletter on that video, and we have arrived. :-) 

At about the four-minute mark in the video embedded below, McLuhan begins talking about the significance of our disincarnation. He says:

Everybody has become porous. The light and the message go right through us.

At this moment, we are on the air. We do not have any physical body. When you’re on the telephone or on radio or on TV, you don’t have a physical body —you’re just an image on the air.

When you don’t have a physical body, you’re a discarnate being. You have a very different relation to the world around you.

I think this has been one of the big effects of the electric age. It has deprived people really of their private identity.

Following that thought are the thoughts from McLuhan that we covered in the last newsletter about how a love for nostalgia is a hallmark of one’s loss of identity.

I don’t have too much to say here as I think McLuhan’s thoughts stand pretty well on their own. But I do want us to consider what he says in light of social media. 

McLuhan is speaking to a host in a TV interview, which is why he’s focusing on the “on air” bit, but the same applies to social media, doesn’t it? In fact, he’s even specifically focusing on privacy and disincarnation, which should be a concern, but I think it’s a much broader issue in some pretty obvious ways.

We treat others differently when they aren’t physically in front of us, plain and simple. This has always been the case, even since before social media, but it is just one of the myriad reasons social media conflict is so insidious. When we are disincarnate, as McLuhan puts it, we have a different relationship with the world around us. How we treat people and conflict and all manner of other matters in the digital, virtual world is quite different than how we would treat these things in person…or, at least that has historically been the case.

My fear is that the cruel ways we often treat people when we are interacting with people as disincarnates has begun to spill over into offline life and will continue to as time goes on. 

The means we use to communicate with one another affects not only how we communicate with one another, but how we treat one another as image-bearers. One day, I hope, we will begin to see how the disincarnation we experience in our relations via social media have a net negative effect on us at scale.