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.”

McLuhan turns 106 years: a digital prophet, The Sun (UK)

DIGITAL PROPHET 

Who was Marshall McLuhan? Google Doodle marks 106th birthday of the Canadian man who ‘predicted the internet’

21 July 2017

The Sun

by: Sam Webb

He was one of the 20th century's most important thinkers on media and the way it affects humanity

Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born in July 1911 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and died on December 31, 1980.

He was a professor, philosopher, intellectual and writer and has influenced everything from journalism to advertising to the arts.

After writing The Mechanical Bride, a critique of the world of advertising, and The Gutenberg Galaxy, which laid out how printing changed Western civilisation, he published Understanding Media.

The book deals with technology and media and how it affects the way people think.

His famous phrase “the medium is the message” means the way we try to convey a message influences the way any message is understood – and in some ways is more important than the message itself.

For example, a TV news report about a horrifying crime may be less about the news story itself than the way the news report affects how the public perceives crime because it has been brought into their home via TV.

Did Marshal McLuhan predict the internet?

Almost 30 years before the internet was born, his book The Gutenberg Galaxy prophesied the web technology seen today.

He wrote: “The next medium, whatever it is—it may be the extension of consciousness—will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form.

“A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organisation, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.”

Electron Don: Trump unlocks the media environment (Part 1)

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)

McLuhan Predicts Cellphone... and more (1965)

Marshall McLuhan, media guru of the late 1960s and 1970s, predicted the cellphone in 1965! McLuhan explained the significance of digital media prior to the invention of the personal computer and cellphone technology. Our evidence? An article from May 5, 1965 in The New Yorker magazine. The Talk of the Town column at the front of that issue features  a piece entitled “The McLuhan Metaphor .” The article’s publication coincided with the New York World’s Fair. You remember the World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens, with the famous Unisphere, the globe used in the movie Men in Black…? The globe is still there, not far from LaGuardia Airport and adjacent  to the U.S. Open tennis stadium. The globe is a perfect metaphor for the insights of Marshall McLuhan, the man who coined the phrase “global village” to define the world we now live in. But the real action that May was happening in Brooklyn, the next borough over, where McLuhan delivered a talk at a Presbyterian church.

The New Yorker author describes McLuhan’s lecture at Spencer Memorial Church in Brooklyn and quotes several startling prophecies included in his remarks: “(He) predicted a happy day when everyone will have his own portable computer to cope with the dreary business of digesting information.”

“Dr. McLuhan next suggested the possibility of a new technology that would extend consciousness itself into the environment. ‘A kind of computerized ESP,’ he called it, envisioning ‘consciousness as the corporate content of the environment—and eventually maybe even a small portable computer, about the size of a hearing aid, that would process our private experience through the corporate experience, the way dreams do now.’”

McLuhan’s accurate prediction of the personal computer and smaller portable devices merits no further explanation but the second insight--consciousness as the new environment-- cuts to the very essence of the present digital era.   Imagine the hearing aid device, anticipated by  McLuhan, as an iPhone or other mobile device. Every individual typing into a Facebook or Twitter application shares private experiences with the wider world, and McLuhan uses the term “corporate group” to indicate the wider world. The posts are exactly as McLuhan described, personal, random thoughts offered in a dreamlike manner. McLuhan perceived the new electronic environment as consciousness— and no better description exists of the modern social network.

The author mentions the plan of industrial giant Westinghouse to place a Time Capsule for future generations at the site of the  World’s Fair. The author suggests Marshall McLuhan might be better utilized as a better Time Capsule than a display of mere physical objects, “cultural and technological mementos of twentieth-century man.” The anonymous writer, in a brilliant feat of understatement,  suggests that McLuhan will teach us more about his era, than any of the lavish futuristic exhibits sponsored by Ford and General Motors. I visited those exhibits and remember the emphasis on automobiles buzzing around the superhighways of the future.  Of course, the ctual superhighway of the future became the Internet.

The 1965 The New Yorker writer notes McLuhan entered the scene as an author, “by three startling books on Western civilization-- The Mechanical Bride, The Gutenberg Galaxy, and most recently Understanding Media, in which he joyfully explores the tribal virtues of popular culture, casts a cynical eye on the ‘classification traditions’ that came in with print and sees near-mythic possibilities in our computer age.”

A year later, at the Texas-Stanford Seminar on “The Meaning of Commercial Television” in April 1966, McLuhan explained further. His audacious comments must have surprised the audience of media professionals and scholars:

1)   The western world organizes itself visually by connective, uniform and continuous space.

2)   Every new medium changes our whole spatial orientation.

3)   We are in the business of reprogramming the sensory life of North America, changing the entire outlook and experience of the population.     

                                                              

                                                                                    (Donner 90-93)

McLuhan’s predictions for deepened audience engagement following the shift from print media to electronic media cannot be overstated as essential to understanding the electronic environment. The inability of individuals to separate from the social network even has an acronym (FOMO) referring to a “fear of missing out.” McLuhan’s notion of new technology working as extensions of the human body had achieved new levels of traction in the electronic era, for if clothing extended the skin, and the wheel extended the legs’ ability to achieve movement, “the computer achieved not merely an extension of our eyes, like print, but an extension of our whole nervous system.”  (New Yorker 1965)