Blog Post #2: Contagious Words: McLuhan's Sensorium and the Language Virus in Ponty Pool - Alessia Lafarciola

 Question 3:

Marshall McLuhan's theory of the human sensorium emphasizes how humans experience the world through their five senses, sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. According to McLuhan, every medium is an extension of our senses, more specifically, he emphasizes how tele-technolgoies, such as telephones, and teveisions extense our senses of sight and hearing changing the ways we experience the world. One of McLuhan's key points is that when a new technology enters a culture, it doesn't have to do something physically notecable to change us, but it insteadshifts how we percieve and interact with the world. 

From McLuhan's framework, the auditory and oral pradictions are vulnerable to distortion, as we saw through Pontypool. The language virus that spread through spoken words. In the movie Pontypool, a virus spread through spolen work, connecting to McLuhan's idea that speech is an extension of our auditory senses. Since speech trasncepts through time so quickly, it directly enters our minds without much time to think about it. This is what made the virus so dangerous, it used the speech of speech and oral communciation to infect people before they can process what the words meant. Technology within the film helped spread the virus even faster. For example, Grant Mazzy utilized the radio as an extension of human speech, allowing the spoken word to travel farther and reach more people. From McLuhan's perspective, these are space-biased media which means tha tthey help information spread over a larger distance/ The virus, spreads through these technologies and amplifies the infection. McLuhan's sensorium theory helkps explain how vulnerable the spoken language can be when it is corrupted.  In this case, speech, normally a powerful medium of communication that helps connect individuals was twisted into something dangerous, revealing how media nut just shapes how we communicate, but how we expereince reality. 

In conclusion, from the perspective of McLuhan, the language virus that we witness in Pontypool represents the "dark" side of auditory and oral media. It showcases how speech, the capstone of human communication, can be both a medium to communicate, yet a medium for disruption when manipulated. From this perspective, the medium can shape, and distort our sensorium, leaving us infected with a disese we are unable to proccess.

On a different hand, when reflecting on this question I thought about the realities of social media and how digital media also does this. Just as oral speech in Pontypool becomes a virus that spreads through communication, social media can act similarily, distoring reality and reshaping how we interact with others. Social media, like speech, is a powerful medium that connects people accross a vast distance, but has the capacity to manipulate information, impacting the ways we view the world. For example, trends are like echo chambers, and the spread of these trendscan be seens as digital forms of the language virus. In both Pontypool and the realities of social media, we see how media, whehter oral or digital can shape, distort and disrupt our understadnings of the world.