Marshall McLuhan: The World is a Global Village, 1960

CBC TV—Explorations (Program)—The World is a Global Village 1960 

Marshall McLuhan can be seen on a YouTube clip from a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) television program entitled Explorations aired on May 18, 1960.

Any dedicated student of Marshall McLuhan will be richly rewarded for watching  patiently through the extended introduction by Canadian TV hosts. Stay with the video through the 3:00 minute mark. Marshall McLuhan himself arrives on the set and accurately predicts the world that you and I have come to occupy in 2017.

Here’s the link-- 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7WXagEHFFI

McLuhan enters the frame and deconstructs an idiomatic phrase, the slang term “with it.” McLuhan begins with the phrase “with it” to elucidate his main point—the connectedness of post-literate, electronic man.He asserts the meaning as “we’ve understood completely, we’ve got the message as it were in every way possible.”  As for the print era man “they were not with it, they were away from it, by themselves with their own private point of view.”

McLuhan’s predicts the re-tribalization of mankind over the next 5 minutes of his interview by Alan Millar, CBC TV host. 

“Tribal man," McLuhan expounds, is "the man created by the new electronic media.”

McLuhan presents the revolutionary notions cheerfully as a high school teacher providing an algebra lesson. The clip reveals McLuhan as firmly and precisely in command of his revolutionary principles well in advance of the publication of The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964).

The YouTube clip extends just over 8 minutes (8:43) and is a small portion of a what was originally a half-hour show devoted to the subject of teenagers, a few years before the arrival of the Beatles and the youth revolution of the hippies. McLuhan comments on teenagers at the end of the clip, distinguishing adolescents from teenagers. Adolescents, he says, have an individualist print culture perspective, always searching for personal identity while teenagers, a product of electronic culture, seek identification with the group.

McLuhan’s provocative language captures the all-at-onceness of life in the 21^st century: 

“The new media has made everything into a single unit…like a continually sounding tribal drum where everybody gets the same message all the time… a princess gets married in England, an earthquake in North Africa, a Hollywood star gets drunk… I use the word tribal. It’s probably the key word of this whole half-hour.” 

McLuhan has circled back to the concept of the global village with the image of the tribal drum.

Alan Millar, host for the program, asks “Aren’t media, as I think most of us feel, on the edges of our life?”

McLuhan responds, “Media is at the heart of our life because the media work through our senses.”