The Present and Future of Hairy Armpits

I shaved my armpits the other day.

I hadn’t shaved my armpits all summer. It was something I felt a kind of pride about.

As I was shaving off the growth, I suddenly started to relate my razor to Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about the medium being the message. The razor being the medium.

Shaving was the action of which I originally thought was the message. By shaving, I would buy into the media’s portrayal of beauty. I would fall into some ‘universal standard’, which would justify my buying of overpriced razors now...wrinkle reducers and age defiers later.

But maybe I was focusing on the wrong aspect of the situation.

Maybe I should have been focusing on the creation of the razor. What importance did it play in the way our culture has panned out?

My guess is that women didn’t start shaving their legs or armpits until the invention of the safety shield on the razor. I bet it started with the upper-classes, trying once again to distinguish themselves from those below them. With the advent of the industrial revolution, razors with safety shields could suddenly be massed produced on some scale, largely for sale to the ‘new wealth’ folks who wanted to be like ‘old wealth folks’.

So if this is in fact how history panned out, perhaps the razor represents how industrialization has created products that were of no use to us a priori. It created a new type of consumerism, based on the consumer’s irrational desires (to be like the rich), more so than the products actual usefulness.

This, in the case of the razor, altered our societies perception of beauty.

Advances In the Speed of Information Creating a Greater Gap Between the Rich and the Poor?

I don't have internet set up at my place. I thought I could go the whole school year without paying for its service, by depending on family, friends and other institutions. Within the first week of school, I see its necessity for a successful academic year. I've already caved and contacted the cable company.

In Harold Innis' article, "Minerva's Owl", Innis talks about how modes of communication become outdated, replaced by newer, more advanced forms.

T.V. replaces radio. MP3s replace CDs. Internet replaces human contact.

Today, the speed of information is incomprehensible. We live in a culture where there's little temporal distance between desire for information and gratification.

Millions have benefitted from this revolution, myself included. However, growing up middle class in a city center in Canada, its easy to forget that this information is not accessible to everyone.

The internet has an incredible potential to bring people from all kinds of backgrounds closer together. It has the potential to be a true 'commons', where the world can connect and share their experience.

However, those who do not have access to the internet get further removed from the global community.

A little while ago, I was reading opinions about Hugo Chavez on the BBC website. I respected him as a revolutionary, however, according the opinion page, it seemed that those who were actually from Venezuala did not.

Later on, I began to think about which Venezualans were likely to post an opinion on the BBC website. Well-educated, middle class. Obviously not who Chavez was likely to be representing. Those for whom Chavez was fighting, likely did not have access to the internet.

The point is that the internet can bring the world closer together, but one must remember that it is still a middle class dominated medium. Just as important as whom the internet is representing, is whom the internet is not.