It’s unthinkable nowadays to function as a college student without a laptop computer. The technological environment of the university presupposes that we are equipped with certain gadgets. And for God’s sake, we do end up having them.

We pay a price for being linked up with the World Wide Web. Everybody is deeply involved in and constantly distracted by everybody else’s business. The smart phone only aggravates the situation. “I haven’t checked my email” is no longer a good excuse.

The cell phone seems to make the wristwatch obsolescent. Yet some have discovered that after buying a watch, they no longer need to look at the cell phone as much. The watch seems to be coming back, partly to address our nostalgia for the disciplinary society of old when we are living in a control society. “Those were the days,” as the song goes.

The idea of a universal human fate is a fallacy. The more we venture out of campus, the more we realize that there’s much technological diversity in society. As a highly technologized enclave, the campus keeps us from imagining other habits, other daily routines. In a way, we college students are lame ducks in the eye of gadget marketers. We already buy into a particular picture of the good life before we buy specific gadgets.

An interesting way of using texting is to have a sideline conversation with one of the group members while doing group work.

How many of us have realized that Twitter can be appropriated for a poetic use. It’s good for composing haiku, for crafting aphorisms. Has there been a rise in aphorisms and aphorists in the culture, though? Maybe there’s no aphorist in the culture anymore because everybody is one. We will have to see about that.

Each time the gadget buzzes, we are at its service. McLuhan calls media extensions of man. It’s now time to reverse the formulation: contemporary man is the extension of media, a servomechanism, a happy wreck. To be hooked on video games is to be enslaved by electronic codes. There’s no point forcing the rhythms of our flesh and blood to contest with artificial rhythms, regardless of the fact that play and game keep us human and sane.

When TV came to the scene, people’s taste for clothing went from “visual” to “tactile.” The TV medium was also the formal cause of pointillism in painting. Nowadays, people are interaction-averse because, almost by default, communication means mediated communication. It’s already platitudinous to talk about the typical living room scenario during the Thanksgiving break: everybody is on something.

In case you don’t believe literary invention takes time and needs to be a process of slow cooking, simply listen to today’s lyrics (take the Kesha song “Tick Tock”). They are getting increasingly literal. Literalness is a disease, a cultural syndrome.

The No Child Left Behind Act didn’t seem to have helped much. SAT scores have hit a historical low. People seem to find literacy to be artificial and out of place in their right-hemisphere world. They can’t read prose. They can’t read poetry, either. I am sure somewhere someone has written an essay entitled “Digital Natives Come to College.” The time is ripe for such a piece to be written.

Social media is so addictive and paralyzing that some have found it necessary to ask a friend to change their passwords for them so they can’t log in. A friend in need is a friend indeed.

A power outage gets us to see what we normally wouldn’t see. Try and get unplugged for a day and see what happens. The everyday is invisible and incorrigible. On the other hand, it’s also the wellspring of new possibilities of life. Kenneth Burke advocates “planned incongruity.” We need “planned inconvenience.” We need to be protected from ourselves.

When we speak of technology, we tend to think of the latest communications gadgets. How many of us think of the spoken word – humanity’s very first technology, the birth of which coincided with the birth of humanity itself? Language is a technology that separates us permanently from nature. Humanity as such has never had an unmediated encounter with nature. What we experience is our interpretation. Language at once enables and cripples, enlightens and blinds.

We are hopelessly figure-oriented when we think of technology, focusing on the equipment installed in a classroom instead of the classroom itself. Insofar as it still has a layout, the classroom itself constitutes a technology, the logic of which is not unlike that of the courtroom. The rituals of usage give some parties relative power over other parties. Prior to anybody actually entering the space, the logic is already embedded within the spatial layout. A classroom without a front, or without desks, is a radical departure from what we are used to. McLuhan talks about classrooms without walls in the TV era. Nowadays, the classroom has become saturated with built-in and un-built-in devices for telereality and teleaction, to use Paul Virilio’s terminology.

Although the gadget as a figure is visible and tangible, the ground it creates is not. It’s in the latter sense that McLuhan talks about media, and media literacy – an awareness of the psychic and social consequences of the hidden ground. This hidden ground is the formal cause of many things, including what we choose to do and the way we do it. Oriental people traditionally tend to be more ground-aware: not eating livers in the springtime for the sake of homeostasis in accordance with the principles of yin and yang. Westerners prefer to turn their habitat into an artifice, a figure detached from its ground. How often do we see sprinklers working when it’s raining and pouring! This figure orientation is uneconomical and unsustainable.

Much can be said about the schedule as a technology, the planner as a technology, the grade book as a technology, and the list goes on. Yet by far the most virulent technologies are software programs. Software is not “soft” at all. It’s full of teeth, and subjugates us this way and that. It positions us as its captives and instruments. It’s true software may make our day more efficient, but how many thinking people want to be made more efficient? Jeremy Rifkin’s “Times Wars” is a must-read. Each time a new “system” is installed in our environment in the name of Progress, we are faced with a new ethical situation, ethics being the pursuit of the good life. It is the task of thinking people to invent new weapons of resistance, as Gilles Deleuze poignantly points out.

Media literacy on the part of the demos will make “the power that be” and corporate interests fear and tremble. I’m talking about media literacy in a mediumistic sense here. Not every scholar or student of media is aware that there are two traditions in media studies: content orientation and medium orientation. I have the latter in mind when I say “mediumistic.”

One metamessage the movie “Inception” enacts is weightlessness. In our optoelectronic and electroacoustic age, the significance of gravity is being displaced. The movie precisely addresses the anxiety that has resulted. Another way to put it: “Inception” takes “The Matrix” to a more intense level. In case we don’t see our somnambulism, the movie lays it bare for us. As we sit in the movie theater, we are sutured into layers upon layers of dreams. Is there still a “real”? Yes, it is called paralysis.