In *The Medium is the Message*, I think it is really fascinating how McLuhan already predicted that technology would create “villages”. I think this really points to the idea of fandoms, or in this case, groups of people who all believe in something similar - good or bad, person or theory. In FVPA, we learned that facts are (and this is a very simplistic breakdown of the idea) theories or ideas which majority of the population, or people in a particular society at a particular time, agree upon. Does this not mean that, in essence, truth is relative to the theories you surround yourself with and the time period you live in? To use McLuhan’s quote from C.G. Jung:

"[...] Because living constantly in the atmosphere of slaves, he became infected through the unconscious with their psychology. No one can shield him from such an influence.”

To follow on from this, I believe that these “villages” create the perfect environment for misinformation to be spread. For example, the myth that one swallows spiders in their sleep was used as a “fact” to prove how gullible and susceptible people are to misinformation. “In a 1993 *PC Professional* article, columnist Lisa Holst wrote about the ubiquitous lists of “facts” that were circulating via e-mail and how readily they were accepted as truthful by gullible recipients. To demonstrate her point, Holst offered her own made-up list of equally ridiculous “facts,” among which was the statistic cited above about the average person’s swallowing eight spiders per year, which she took from a collection of common misbeliefs printed in a 1954 book on insect folklore. In a delicious irony, Holst’s propagation of this false “fact” has spurred it into becoming one of the most widely-circulated bits of misinformation to be found on the Internet.” I also think that McLuhan was very spot on when he said that

“technology is capturing us and holding us like prisoners in a jail without walls.”

This very much feels like a hint towards the addiction we see to phones, video games, etc. Facebook and other social media platforms like TikTok, create their apps to be extremely addictive due to how easily they are to keep consuming content. Think about how Youtube suggests more videos to watch, or how Instagram can let you endlessly scroll for new content in the discovery page. Of course, technology and technological advancements are not inherently bad, “The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used which determines their value” (McLuhan, 1964), but it seems that companies, particularly due to (I assume) capitalism, use technology to keep you *needing* more content from them.

Overall, I think that this just shows how crucial it is for us, as new designers, to be aware of things such as stereotypes, biases, etc. because negative content which is consumed by the unwary or ignorant, can harm the *human* empathy that people should have for one another. We *need* to do better and we cannot let bad things remain the way they are, *especially* when we have the power to change it.