Some points made by Marshall McLuhan in "The Medium is the Massage":
The concept of "you" as an individual, unique being is not the same as it was 100 years ago. The concept of "you" is now much closer to the concept of "us". The individual has become the mass.
The family unit has been replaced by the world unit. Children now learn from societies instead of parents.
Electric circuitry has changed the meaning of time and space. Old groupings such as civic, state and nation no longer operate, because technology has exploded geography.
Education and schooling are archaic institutions operating against technology. The media of television contradicts the media of the classroom. Children progress into the adult world confused by the mixing of media, both of which work to communicate the message: Grow up!
"Jobs" are antithetical to both survival and sanity.
Politics, once a form of passive entertainment, has changed drastically. How the world operates politically is now far more apparent than it ever has been. The mass audience has begun to participate. "The living room has become a voting booth."
The individual has become inextricably attached to everyone else. To survive requires participation and a heretofore unseen involvement in each other's lives.
The development of print has conditioned the world to think in a linear manner and to understand physical environments in visual and spatial terms for thousands of years. Before print, hearing was the dominant sense for the means of understanding. Today, technology has brought on a regression. Due to the deluge of information now available, we learn in bits and pieces rather than in the large chunks offered by texts.
Books created the illusion of individuality by offering emotion and thought in a series of physically fixed states - pages in between covers. "Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror." So it is today, in the global village of technology. Individuality is history. Detachment is impossible.
Our perceptions of time and space have developed to the point where it feels as though they have ceased to exist. The speed of technology has forever altered our concept of the speed of natural evolution. All we have to respond to this reality are outdated modes of thinking and feeling. It is totally new.
We no longer put faith in a fixed point of view. Now, we only suspend judgement.
As information piles on information, the desire to fill in the cracks builds higher and higher. And that, my friends, is your cue to comment.
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