March 1969-- Playboy interview with Marshall McLuhan
PLAYBOY-- Would you describe the detribalizing process in more detail?
McLUHAN-- The electronically induced technological extensions of our central nervous system, which I spoke of earlier, are immersing us in a world-pool of information movement and thus enabling man to incorporate within himself the whole of mankind. The aloof and dissociated role of the literate man of the Western world is succumbing to the new, intense depth participation engendered by the electronic media and brining us back in touch with ourselves as well as with one another. But the instant nature of electric-information movement is decentralizing-- rather than enlarging-- the family of man into a new state of multitudinous tribal existences. Particularly in countries where literate values are deeply institutionalized, this is a highly traumatic process, since the clash of the old segmented visual culture and the new integral electronic culture creates a crisis of identity, a vacuum of the self, which generates tremendous violence-- violence that is simply an identity quest, private or corporate, social or commercial.
McLuhan says a mouthful there; you could compose a PhD degree thesis for a Communications Studies program on the basis of the single paragraph from the Playboy interview. It took me several years to make sense of McLuhan's ideas. And I urge you to read the entirety of the Playboy interview as a first step to understanding his profound and exciting explanation of our world.
Unbelievably, the Communications Departments across the country ignore McLuhan. McLuhan's brilliant theories helped create those departments. Imagine a Protestant theological seminary refusing to mention Jesus Christ! Communications Departments across the country leave Marshall McLuhan off the curriculum-- though he explains the modern media environment far better than any other theorist before or since. Okay, that's my personal axe to grind.
Trump is the word on everybody's lips. He dominates the news. He dominates late night talk show comedians. We have never seen anything like it. The media studies him with disdain or disbelief, but the media and the journalists rarely look at Trump in context. What makes him different as a candidate-- and now as a president? He maximizes the present-day conditions, the vortex of electrons circling the globe at the speed of light.
Trump was willing to be interviewed by every single media outlet at the outset of his campaign. Hillary Clinton was cautious and measured, planning her every move with the help of pollsters and advisors. Trump seemed to shoot from the hip, answered questions in the moment, said outrageous things and blurted out what seemed to be terrible gaffes. He didn't respect war heroes, violated Republican orthodoxy on social programs, and Republicans howled he was too much the liberal--didn't really seem that religious himself and had even promoted Democratic politicians in previous elections. These print era shibboleths meant nothing to him.
Trump is not a member of the literary class. He is not a book man. Trump is a salesman-- and salesman read environments and understand people. Trump is good on his feet. He moves better and more quickly than the average man, far better than election pollsters and political party hacks. He made himself a one-man campaign organization. How did he do it?
Trump instinctively understood the electronic world that McLuhan references above. He had television experience. He was a subject of the New York tabloids and grasped "all publicity is good publicity." Twitter enabled him to go around the media, but actually his entertainment value earned billions of dollars of free media during the campaign wars. Nobody can figure out how he did it? Was it the help of the Russians? Was it the new populism?
Trump never read McLuhan, but as a savvy salesman he could see the new media environment allowed him a way in. The New York Times appeals to the literate man. He calls them "the failing New York Times." In a sense he is correct, print media struggles mightily to keep up with the lighting- fast electronic environment.
Trump as an integral, electronic man-- confident in his own judgement, he has shown little respect for the state apparatus-- the bureaucracies with initials like CIA, FBI, NSA-- carryovers from the print era (1450-1900) initiated by Johannes Gutenberg with the invention of the printing press. (See Marshall McLuhan's masterpiece-- The Gutenberg Galaxy).
Trump has soundly rejected the expertise of the experts. Those geniuses got us into a mess in Iraq. I don't need no friggin alphabets to tell me what to think... said Trump. He declared war on his opponents-- Low Energy Jeb, Lyin' Ted, Little Marco and Crooked Hillary-- and won. Nobody came up with a single nickname for Donald Trump. Maybe we should call him Electron Don--for, as McLuhan says, we have left the Gutenberg galaxy for the constellation of Marconi. Guglielmo Marconi's invention of the telegraph, explains McLuhan, ushered in the world for the world of electrons (1900-present).
Trump appears positively iconoclastic in his disinterest in print-era structures, including the Constitution, a most important print document to the creation and health of the American Republic. But for how long? He passes up the hallowed document for the latest from Breitbart or Fox News.
(Next post-- will continue this discussion)
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