The purpose of this essay is not to present an academic claim, but to convey my thoughts based entirely on my personal readings. To avoid any confusion, I will begin this section by referring to the thought process I will employ in subsequent sections.
Introduction
Media is a message. Today, when you pick up a McLuhan book, you will realize that works written in the 1960s remain relevant even today. In addition, you may find that some sentences seem as if they were written directly for today.
When things go far enough, humankind thus becomes a creature of its own machine.
-Excerpt from the book "Media Message, Media is the Message"
To be a creature of one's own machine is a very bold statement for the technologies of that time, because the most common technologies were radio and television. Home computers weren't even mentioned. And in a time when technologies were so limited, McLuhan was able to make incredible statements that encompass even the present and the future.
Media is the message. This is McLuhan's most important and well-known theory. However, when you look at the subheadings used to construct this two-word sentence, almost every subheading is serious enough to be the main subject of a study in itself. The subheading I will address is the one where he talks about media being an extension of the physical and spiritual aspects of humanity.
All media is an extension of certain physical and mental faculties of human beings. The wheel is an extension of the foot; the book is an extension of the eye; clothing is an extension of the skin…
-Excerpt from the book "Media Message, Media is the Message"
Upon reflection on this quote, it becomes clear that everything humanity has conceived and produced today stems from one or more of its own characteristics. This explains why McLuhan's thoughts and work are timeless. The idea that what humanity has produced from yesterday to today is essentially an interpretation of a part of itself makes it easier for us to make more consistent predictions about the future.
In this context, my own thought and conclusion is this: The virtual world we inhabit today is an extension of the brain. And the world we inhabit today is an extension of the virtual world.
The Virtual World is an Extension of the Brain
About 100 years ago, an archivist would meticulously examine tons of documents, sorting and organizing them according to their dates and categories. Even the thought of it was incredibly laborious. Now, let's look at today; we have programs that can handle all this archival work in minutes. These programs were something people could only dream of in their minds years ago, but now almost every technological device can do it.
We can say that computers are extensions of things that are physically difficult to fit into the world. Many files and accounts, which in the past were equivalent to tons of paper, are now equivalent to many punched cards, and today to the size of a hard drive.
Of course, the advent of digitalization would require a digital space; after all, data was no longer on paper, but in another realm. This, naturally, would inevitably lead to people wanting to explore this virtual world and asking themselves, "What else can be done in this realm?"
Personally, my favorite example is William Higinbotham creating the first video game. Higinbotham designed a simple tennis game for bored visitors in his lab. For the first time, people could interact with a world inside a screen. That day was actually a milestone, because it pioneered something new; a non-physical but experiential world. In other words, the virtual world.
The closest example of this is like trying things out on your own with a newly learned software program.
The virtual world has made incredible strides thanks to Higinbotham and many others like him. Every successful or unsuccessful attempt to push the boundaries of technology has contributed to the creation of the virtual world we use today.
If we go back a few years, the virtual world was a Saturday night pastime for many; today, it is progressing towards becoming a place we are in every day, and if we push it a little further, every second.
Before you even realize it, your hand reflexively reaches for your phone; you find yourself watching videos on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. Social media, then, is an extension of dopamine.
You have a complex dataset at your disposal, and you build an artificial neural network (ANN) to organize it. It's similar to organizing multiple tasks simultaneously. ANNs are extensions of neurons.
Take the map applications we use today. Our brain uses the hippocampus to perceive space. Map applications are extensions of the hippocampus.
Hippokampus
Today, the real world is beginning to merge with the virtual world. This is already a predictable assumption for tech enthusiasts. But how will this happen? I will address this topic in the next section.
The Real World is an Extension of the Virtual World
Today, advertising campaigns and actions like mobilizing masses are carried out through social media platforms. And the place they all try to influence is your mind. Think about it, smartphones are now indispensable, and as in the example in the previous section, we have started to pick up our phones reflexively. Naturally, the place where advertisements and ideas that try to appeal to the individual can be launched and reach the masses most quickly is not only social media, but also the virtual world.
So how does the extension of the virtual world influence the real world? This influence is more mental and linguistic than material. English is one of the indispensable languages worldwide today. If you want to reach the world, not just an audience in your own country, you can do so through social media and English. You just need your content to be somewhat engaging; the rest follows like a snowball effect.
The awareness created in the virtual world triggers the real world. I want to clarify this with a few examples.
The Arab Spring: Tweets, hashtags, and other social media posts triggered popular protests, uprisings, and conflicts in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and neighboring countries.
GameStop Short Squeeze: A surge in the stock price of a physical video game retailer from $20 to $400, fueled by calls on Reddit. This gave rise to the term "meme stock" and highlighted the potential for stock market manipulation by social media audiences.
Star Wars Battlefront II: A Reddit user asked why unlocking characters like Darth Vader was so difficult and expensive. EA responded coldly, "We want to give players a sense of accomplishment and pride," leading to one of the biggest online lynchings. Even after making changes to the game, EA failed to reconnect with its original audience.
George Floyd: The rapid spread of images related to George Floyd's death on social media transformed a local police incident into a global political movement. Online content has directly triggered street protests, corporate reforms, and public policies. This has led to the formation of a consciousness where the online world is not only representative but can directly influence reality.
Cambridge Analytica: collected data from millions of people on Facebook, not just basic information like age and gender, but also their specific interests, concerns, and sources of anger, creating a psychometric profile of each user. By directly influencing algorithms, they caused posts that could create a counter-effect to be specifically included in that user's feed, directly impacting the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US elections, becoming one of the biggest and most important examples of data manipulation and disinformation.
All these examples, and many more, have triggered and activated the data and consciousnesses within the virtual world. However, this doesn't yet mean that the real world is an extension of the virtual world. Because the examples above are simply adaptations of media content from throughout history. My theory is that all of this is a stepping stone.
The real world is an extension of the virtual world. This sounds very much like a line from The Matrix, but today, statements from high-tech figures like Zuckerberg, Musk, and Gates are ringing the bells of a shift towards merging consciousness with technology and moving the virtual world towards replacing the real world.
It's not hard to see that Zuckerberg is trying to lead the way in this area with his statements and investments. Consider Metaquest. Virtual entertainment areas, virtual meetings, etc. But why did Zuckerberg's project fail? Because transitioning from the real world to that virtual world was pure torture. The heavy device you put on your head, the dizziness and nausea caused by prolonged use, all contributed to Metaquest's initial failure. However, this wasn't entirely a failure. The process of improving the device, fixing its shortcomings, and re-releasing it using user data seems likely to continue until Metaquest becomes something like Nervgear (a virtual reality device from Sword Art Online).
Works depicting dystopian futures, like Ghost in the Shell and The Matrix, aren't created solely for popularity. Their authors also have a vision and a perspective on the future. The actions of people like Zuckerberg can create a vision of the future and give authors' works, even fictional ones, a degree of realism. What I'm describing might seem very abstract or just science fiction, but only a few years ago we would have dreamed of things like, "Wouldn't it be great if an AI like Carvis existed?" and today we have countless trainable AIs like ChatGPT and Gemini.
Technology is the magic of the modern world. With sufficient reading and reasoning, the direction of this magic can be largely predicted. This text is an attempt to understand that direction.
Summary
The purpose of this essay is not to present an academic claim, but to convey my thoughts based entirely on my personal readings. To avoid any confusion, I will begin this section by referring to the thought process I will employ in subsequent sections.
Introduction
Media is a message. Today, when you pick up a McLuhan book, you will realize that works written in the 1960s remain relevant even today. In addition, you may find that some sentences seem as if they were written directly for today.
To be a creature of one's own machine is a very bold statement for the technologies of that time, because the most common technologies were radio and television. Home computers weren't even mentioned. And in a time when technologies were so limited, McLuhan was able to make incredible statements that encompass even the present and the future.
Media is the message. This is McLuhan's most important and well-known theory. However, when you look at the subheadings used to construct this two-word sentence, almost every subheading is serious enough to be the main subject of a study in itself. The subheading I will address is the one where he talks about media being an extension of the physical and spiritual aspects of humanity.
Upon reflection on this quote, it becomes clear that everything humanity has conceived and produced today stems from one or more of its own characteristics. This explains why McLuhan's thoughts and work are timeless. The idea that what humanity has produced from yesterday to today is essentially an interpretation of a part of itself makes it easier for us to make more consistent predictions about the future.
In this context, my own thought and conclusion is this: The virtual world we inhabit today is an extension of the brain. And the world we inhabit today is an extension of the virtual world.
The Virtual World is an Extension of the Brain
About 100 years ago, an archivist would meticulously examine tons of documents, sorting and organizing them according to their dates and categories. Even the thought of it was incredibly laborious. Now, let's look at today; we have programs that can handle all this archival work in minutes. These programs were something people could only dream of in their minds years ago, but now almost every technological device can do it.
We can say that computers are extensions of things that are physically difficult to fit into the world. Many files and accounts, which in the past were equivalent to tons of paper, are now equivalent to many punched cards, and today to the size of a hard drive.
Of course, the advent of digitalization would require a digital space; after all, data was no longer on paper, but in another realm. This, naturally, would inevitably lead to people wanting to explore this virtual world and asking themselves, "What else can be done in this realm?"
Personally, my favorite example is William Higinbotham creating the first video game. Higinbotham designed a simple tennis game for bored visitors in his lab. For the first time, people could interact with a world inside a screen. That day was actually a milestone, because it pioneered something new; a non-physical but experiential world. In other words, the virtual world.
The closest example of this is like trying things out on your own with a newly learned software program.
The virtual world has made incredible strides thanks to Higinbotham and many others like him. Every successful or unsuccessful attempt to push the boundaries of technology has contributed to the creation of the virtual world we use today.
If we go back a few years, the virtual world was a Saturday night pastime for many; today, it is progressing towards becoming a place we are in every day, and if we push it a little further, every second.
Today, the real world is beginning to merge with the virtual world. This is already a predictable assumption for tech enthusiasts. But how will this happen? I will address this topic in the next section.
The Real World is an Extension of the Virtual World
Today, advertising campaigns and actions like mobilizing masses are carried out through social media platforms. And the place they all try to influence is your mind. Think about it, smartphones are now indispensable, and as in the example in the previous section, we have started to pick up our phones reflexively. Naturally, the place where advertisements and ideas that try to appeal to the individual can be launched and reach the masses most quickly is not only social media, but also the virtual world.
So how does the extension of the virtual world influence the real world? This influence is more mental and linguistic than material. English is one of the indispensable languages worldwide today. If you want to reach the world, not just an audience in your own country, you can do so through social media and English. You just need your content to be somewhat engaging; the rest follows like a snowball effect.
The awareness created in the virtual world triggers the real world. I want to clarify this with a few examples.
All these examples, and many more, have triggered and activated the data and consciousnesses within the virtual world. However, this doesn't yet mean that the real world is an extension of the virtual world. Because the examples above are simply adaptations of media content from throughout history. My theory is that all of this is a stepping stone.
The real world is an extension of the virtual world. This sounds very much like a line from The Matrix, but today, statements from high-tech figures like Zuckerberg, Musk, and Gates are ringing the bells of a shift towards merging consciousness with technology and moving the virtual world towards replacing the real world.
It's not hard to see that Zuckerberg is trying to lead the way in this area with his statements and investments. Consider Metaquest. Virtual entertainment areas, virtual meetings, etc. But why did Zuckerberg's project fail? Because transitioning from the real world to that virtual world was pure torture. The heavy device you put on your head, the dizziness and nausea caused by prolonged use, all contributed to Metaquest's initial failure. However, this wasn't entirely a failure. The process of improving the device, fixing its shortcomings, and re-releasing it using user data seems likely to continue until Metaquest becomes something like Nervgear (a virtual reality device from Sword Art Online).
Works depicting dystopian futures, like Ghost in the Shell and The Matrix, aren't created solely for popularity. Their authors also have a vision and a perspective on the future. The actions of people like Zuckerberg can create a vision of the future and give authors' works, even fictional ones, a degree of realism. What I'm describing might seem very abstract or just science fiction, but only a few years ago we would have dreamed of things like, "Wouldn't it be great if an AI like Carvis existed?" and today we have countless trainable AIs like ChatGPT and Gemini.
Technology is the magic of the modern world. With sufficient reading and reasoning, the direction of this magic can be largely predicted. This text is an attempt to understand that direction.