untitled advice column #2
on canadian philosopher marshall mcluhan and very belated birthday advice
hello my lovely readers!
these answers to some questions in my advice form have been sitting in my drafts for a while and i finally got around to finishing them after being laid off. really freed up a lot of my time!
i hope this advice is helpful for you, and if you have any more questions, feel free to submit them to my advice form.
presents for step-parents
Do I need to get my step-mum a present for her birthday? We've never been particularly close despite her being in my life for about 3 years now... sometimes i feel a pull to try and connect with her but mostly our relationship just feels awkward. I guess I'm asking if you think its worth trying to force a relationship out of nothing, considering she's a big part of my family now. (a little context: i'm 16, i see her every couple weekends or so). Thanks for reading, love the blog!! <3
- bread girl
hi bread girl! i’m sorry i didn’t answer this back in july when it was probably more relevant. hopefully my answer can help guide you for next year, or help guide anyone else with a similar predicament.
i don’t personally have any step-parents, but when considering getting gifts for people i’m in an awkward situation with, i take these things into account:
how often do i see them?
am i seeing them on or very close to their birthday?
did they get me a gift for my birthday?
is my financial situation good enough that they know i can afford a gift?
this is based on my own anxiety around social conventions, which might be entirely made up in my head. but if i’m seeing a person often enough, i’m seeing them on their birthday, and they got me something for my birthday (or another holiday), i generally will get them a gift. in times where my financial situation was precarious, i got them a gift with the help of another family member or friend (sign both names on the card), or make them something with things i already have. this can be something baked, a really nice drawing, a craft of some kind showing you know what they like. i think the more personal things like this do show an interest in connecting with a person, and can be really meaningful! but in times where i’m straight up broke, i don’t get a gift for any family or extended family, since usually they’ll understand.
but on the bigger question of whether you should try connecting with your step-mum, i think there’s a natural awkwardness that comes with someone entering a family they weren’t in before. if you don’t sense any malice or meanness from her, chances are she would appreciate any effort to connect with you. humans are social animals, we generally want to feel comfortable in family settings, and when one person reaches out to be closer, the other will usually respond well to that.
i hope this helps! sorry about being so late on this response!
marshall mcluhan returns from the dead
hi sam, longtime reader, first-time questioner here:
I have a theory called 'the medium is the message.' How do you think it applies to the social medias you use in your life? How do you think it applies to this very column you're writing, now? xoxo
marshy
hi marshall mcluhan! nice of you to chat from beyond the grave.
before i start, i should mention i did not study this theory in university and all my understanding of it is from reading the first chapter of understanding media and a few supplemental sources like wikipedia, and hearing others talk about it. if anything i say about this theory and how it applies feels surface-level or like i’m missing the point, it’s just that i’m a bit of a doofus.
my first introduction to social media was through neopets, which i believe i first started using in 2004. i’ve been using different media since i was 7 years old to communicate, all of which are vastly different in their utility and shaped me and those around me in different ways. it would take a long time for me to deconstruct how “the medium is the message” applies to every social media platform i’ve ever used, so i’ll focus on just a few.
facebook
when facebook became available for people outside of universities, it really changed life for a lot of us. the ability to connect with people you haven’t seen in years, to connect with classmates and friends everywhere, and even meet strangers opened us up to mass movement of information online. suddenly you could see everyone’s thoughts and opinions, where they get their news from, what they do for fun, and how they communicate with others. this medium connected people in a way we hadn’t really seen before, and made us susceptible to messaging we may not have seen before. conspiracy theories, misinformation, and harassment campaigns became so easy, and forced us to either learn media literacy or fall prey to any information that comes our way. as a medium, it teaches us to seek community in the truth we believe in, and that truth means something different to everybody.
in my own use of facebook early on, the message of the medium was that i can connect with anyone i know and grow my friendships without even seeing the person in front of me. but also that i can be bullied or join in on bullying, and be genuinely hurt or hurt others. cyberbullying was rampant on facebook around the time i joined, and i was massively hurt by that, and i hurt other people by not saying anything when i saw bullying happening. it left me with massive guilt for how i may have impacted others lives through the medium. i hardly use it anymore except to check in on old friends or to remind people to vote, because it becomes too much for me to see how people use the website.
twitter
with tweets being limited to 280 characters (140 back in my day), you’re given so little to say something that nuance is often lost. even with the ability to make threads, people won’t always finish them. the medium is really limiting and you’re forced to say so much in so few characters if you have something important to say. the platform therefore makes it hard to make a good argument without everyone reading your tweets in full, and if they boost it to retweet it, their followers will see that tweet and might not read the rest.
for this reason, twitter is the ultimate medium for:
shitposting
posting something insane and leaving it up to interpretation for chaos reasons
the medium is great for humour and short thoughts, and good for chaos overall. the microblogging format allows for us to consume a lot of these thoughts and experience the chaos so quickly. but i also feel like the medium forces you to trim the fat, kill your darlings, whatever else. you have to be concise with your words, and that’s actually really great for getting a point across a lot of the time. i think the medium forces us to be better at our messaging, or perish (become villain of the day).
substack
substack is such an interesting platform. i can write however much i want, but if i write too much people might not actually finish reading it, and if i don’t break it up with images and pull quotes and headings, the wall of text might be too overwhelming for people’s eyes. i use a lot of the same principles of the writing i’ve done in my other writing work, because readability is so important for keeping an audience. this means i need to find strategic places to put headings and quotes and images that make sense, break up the text, but don’t distract from the message i’m sending. and in an advice column format, i have to make sure i don’t meander, i have to get to the point, and the advice i give has to be appropriate for a mass audience with not a lot of context beyond what’s written.
i think what happens with the freedom of substack, especially with the ability to monetize content, you get bad actors looking to make bank off controversy. take a look at bari weiss, who started using substack after quitting the new york times (people hated working with her, who’d have expected that?). her move to substack allows her to make money directly off people who want to read her ideas of freedom of speech and censorship, which she was truly hardly subject to (just read any of her columns in the new york times).
another example is tara henley, who started a substack newsletter after leaving the CBC, writing that “To work at the CBC in the current climate is to embrace cognitive dissonance and to abandon journalistic integrity.” her homophobic, transphobic, racist examples of why the CBC is straying from journalistic integrity show to the audience that she doesn’t put up with basic journalistic principles with fair balance or covering issues important to local communities, but she does so in a way that flips that on its head and makes it sound like she’s the one with integrity. through creating a substack, she is now creating a platform for herself that she can freely monetize and send the message that you don’t have to put up with wokeness in journalism. it all kind of feels like a grift, and substack really does allow for that.
to sum it up, substack’s message can be that you can say whatever you want and profit from it, and that’s done simply through advertising yourself effectively. if that advertising is done through creating controversy and discourse, it still pays off in the end for those people.
i hope those thoughts on the medium is the message are interesting or make sense, again i am not well-versed in this area of philosophy so if i fully misread the bits of marshall mcluhan’s work i’ve absorbed, i apologize and hope it can stand on its own.
if you have any questions for me that you want answered (and it will be more timely this time, i promise) you can submit them here.
i also have a paid tier for my substack now since, where i’ll be publishing personal essays, opinions, and more. i’ll be publishing paid posts at least twice a month, so if you want to support me, please consider subscribing.