The Medium is 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 can't filter what you hear, the noises in the environment around you demand your attention, whether you like it or not. In stark contrast to visual stimulation – which has become increasingly abundant in today's age of social media consumerism – you can't close your ears to something you don't want to hear. As McLuhan says, “We simply don't have eyelids.” So what does it mean? In a vacuum, the "ear world" is all-encompassing and 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 Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayIn our most primal core, it was once the most desirable. As a species, humans evolved to be fiercely social creatures to survive, and we would find peace in bonding through conversations, music, and shared chants. For thousands of years, sound has been what brought people together in moments of leisure. Keep your vision clear while you work, hunt, gather or avoid predators, then relax and let the sounds of your environment envelop you in rest. That's what we've come to appreciate as a species, and that symmetry is what can make us feel whole. But in the modern age of television, billboards and cell phones, visual stimuli never cease. We have closed ourselves in a box, which is completely suitable for us and only us. We choose which channels we will watch, which accounts to follow, which messages we will receive. In doing so, we have created a perfectly customized entertainment echo chamber. While our natural instincts push us towards the meritocracy of sound, we instead opt for what is most comfortable for us. In our free time, we now only see what we want to see, and any deviation from that norm incites angry comments or unfollowing, in an attempt to keep our environment exclusive to our exact preferences. Perhaps only time will tell what this deviance from our instinctive behavior will generate. McLuhan published this work in 1967, but its tone and introspective look at our society seem straight out of a Generation Z dystopian hit. Yet here we are, more than 50 years later, and while modern culture still stirs same “end is near” projections for the future, whether or not right now is truly the dystopia that generations before us have claimed is entirely subjective. But the message McLuhan intended to convey may not be the apocalyptic analysis that millennials and Generation Z are so accustomed to from our elders. Fundamentally, McLuhan was an observer. His findings from what were the modern media were written without bias or bias. McLuhan simply provided an outsider's analysis of human nature and how it meshes with the media we consume. A trend toward personalized visual stimuli and away from the common auditory environment is not in itself a bad thing for the individual or society, and McLuhan does 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 outlets of news, entertainment and conversation compete for our attention, and only the most inspiring can earn it. Our time has never been so precious, even while we "waste" it browsing online. But again, this process of eliminating what is not worthy of the right to our time comes.