We Are All Actors (Marshall McLuhan)

Donald Trump, former host of a reality television show, became president and turned the nation and the world into a reality television show-- complete with cliff-hangers, constant conflict and a barrage of insults for friends and foe alike. Trump TV engages us all. Marshall McLuhan died in 1980 but anticipated correctly our present state of connectedness. His comments below, powerful and challenging, are tour de force McLuhan... every sentence contains a Master's thesis.

The End of the Work Ethic 

(an address by Marshall McLuhan to the Empire Club of Canada)

Living electronically, where the effects come before the causes, is a rather graphic and vivid way of explaining why distant goals and objectives are somewhat meaningless to “neuronic” man. Electronic man, that is, works is a world where electronic services are an expansion of an environmental form, of his own nervous system. To such a man is it meaningless to say that he should seek or pursue distant goals and objectives, since all the satisfactions and objectives are already present to him. This explains the mystery of why preliterate and acoustic peoples appear to us to be so deeply satisfied with such shallow resources and means of existence. Acoustic man, living in a simultaneous environment of electric information, is suddenly disillusioned by the ideal of moreness, whether it be more goods or more people or more security or more fame. Acoustic, or electronic man, understands instantly that the nature and limits of human satisfactions, forbid any increase of happiness through an increase of power or wealth. Acoustic man naturally “plays it by ear” and leaves harmoniously and musically and melodiously. Ecology is only another name for this acoustic simultaneity and sudden responsibility for creating ecological environments pressed very suddenly upon Western man on October 17^th, 1959. That was the day when Sputnik went into orbit, putting this planet inside a man-made environment for the first time. As soon as the planet went inside a man-made environment, the occupants of the planet began to hum and sing the ecological theme song without any further prompting.

When the planet was suddenly enveloped by a man-made artifact, “Nature” flipped into art form. The moment of Sputnik was the moment of creating Spaceship Earth and/or the global theatre. Shakespeare at the Globe had seen all the world as a stage, but with Sputnik, the world literally became a global theatre with no more audiences, only actors.

from Marshall McLuhan essays:

media research

technology, art, communication

—edited with commentary by Michel A. Moos

1980, 1997