Cyber bullying: Technology and McLuhan

Megan, 13, fought back, but she was overwhelmed.

Let's get very fundamental here and go back to the invention of the alphabet to understand what McLuhan is talking about and why it is important.

"The Greek myth about the alphabet was that Cadmus, reputedly the king who introduced the phonetic letters into Greece, sowed dragoon's teeth, and they sprang up armed men. Like any other myth, this one capsulates a prolonged process into a flashing insight. The alphabet meant power and authority and control of military structures at a distance. When combined with papyrus, the alphabet spelled the end of the stationary temple bureaucracies and the priestly monopolies of knowledge and power."

"The phonetic alphabet is a unique technology…This stark division and parallelism between a visual and an auditory world was both crude and ruthless, culturally speaking. The phonetically written sacrifices worlds of meaning and perception that were secured by forms like the hieroglyphs and the Chinese ideogram. These culturally richer forms of writing, however, offered men no means of sudden transfer from the magically discontinuous and traditional world of the tribal word into the cool and uniform visual medium."

"All of these forms [pictographic and hieroglyphic] give pictorial expression to oral meanings. As such, they approximate the animated cartoon and are extremely unwieldy, requiring many signs for the infinity of data operations of social action. In contrast, the phonetic alphabet, by a few letters only, was able to encompass all languages."

"She felt there was no way out," Ms. Meier said. "Mom, they're being horrible!" Megan said, "sobbing into the phone when her mother called. After an hour, Megan ran into her bedroom and hanged herself with a belt."

Has our technology become our master? I think so.

This story about Megan by Christopher Maag, "When the Bullies Turned Faceless" was published in the December 17 edition of the NYTimes.



What did the little bird say to the big bird?

Peck on someone your own size.