Marshall McLuhan & Terrorism

Sept. 11 has been described as a dark fulfillment of Marshall McLuhan's prediction that technology will draw us all into a global village.
http://www.robertfulford.com/SuicideTerrorism.html
 

Is this an attack against the 'global village?'
Mr. de Kerckhove has no doubt: "Yes, this is an attack against the global village, but that's from where the answer has to come, from all the globe not just from the president of U.S.A."
http://www.thehilltimes.ca/terrorism/media1001.html

McLuhan Called It
As we scour the globe for terrorists we need to pay heed to Marshall McLuhan's adage that World War Three would be an information war. If we're to win the hearts and minds of the world's citizens and convince them to rout out terrorists in their midst, we don't need smart bombs, we need smart public relations (PR). But despite corporate America's global media hegemony, we're losing on this front. There's just something about the world's most powerful nation launching all of its military might against the world's most pathetic nation that works against us. Again, our bombs are useless. There are no targets in Afghanistan.
http://mediastudy.com/articles/Apocostupid.html
 

As Marshall McLuhan noted: "Ours is a brand new world of all-at-onceness. Time has ceased, space has vanished. We now live in a global village, a simultaneous happening. We have had to shift our stress of attention from action to reaction. We must now know in advance the consequences of any policy or action, since the results are experienced without delay."
http://www.media-awareness.ca/eng/med/class/multilib/oct2001.htm
 

A year of contradictions
The global village of Marshal McLuhan was very much there to stay. The information technology revolution did more to shrink the globe than any other invention in the communication sector had done before. No country, big or small, could really insulate itself from international events or the thrust of world economic pressures. In this scenario, two important factors worked imperceptibly to compound the world situation. One was the rise of American power which insidiously spread its reach far and wide. This time it did so more subtly and less obtrusively than it had in the early nineties when George Bush Sr's attempts to establish a pax Americana at the end of the cold war had drawn quite a backlash. The second was the rapid growth of religio-paramilitary groups which resorted to extra-constitutional methods, including violence and terrorism to gain their obscurantist ends.
DAWN the INTERNET EDITION
31 December 2000, Sunday ,   04 Shawwal 1421
http://www.dawn.com/2000/text/ed.htm
 
 

"War is never anything less than accelerated technological change. It begins when some notable disequilibrium among existing structures has been brought about by an inequality in rates of growth."
Ch 10, Roads and Paper Routes, page 101, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan, 1964, SIGNET BOOKS, New York
 

"War is accelerated social change as an explosion is an accelerated chemical reaction and movement of matter. With electric speeds governing industry and social life, explosion in the sense of crash development becomes normal. On the other hand, the old-fashioned kind of "war" becomes as impracticable as playing hopscotch with bulldozers. Organic interdependence means that disruption of any part of the organism can prove fatal to the whole. Every industry has had to "rethink through" (the awkwardness of this phrase betrays the painfulness of the process), function by function, its place in the economy. But automation forces not only industry and town planners, but government and even education, to come into some relation to social facts."
Ch 33, Automation, page 306, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan, 1964, SIGNET BOOKS, New York
 

"No society has ever known enough about its actions to have developed immunity to its new extensions or technologies.  Today we have begun to sense that art may be able to provide such immunity.
... The ability of the artist to sidestep the bully blow of new technology of any age, and to parry such violence with full awareness, is age-old.  Equally age-old is the inability of the percussed victims, who cannot sidestep the new violence to recognize their need of the artist.  To reward and to make celebrities of artists can also, be a way of ignoring their prophetic work, and preventing its timely use for survival.  The artist is any man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time.   He is the man of integral awareness."
Ch 7, Challenge and Collapse, page 70, 71, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan, 1964, SIGNET BOOKS, New York
 

 

The Playboy Interview
"Personally, I have a great faith in the resiliency and adaptability of man, and I tend to look to our tomorrows with a surge of excitement and hope. I feel that we're standing on the threshold of a liberating and exhilarating world in which the human tribe can become truly one family and man's consciousness can be freed from the shackles of mechanical culture and enabled to roam the cosmos. I have a deep and abiding belief in man's potential to grow and learn, to plumb the depths of his own being and to learn the secret songs that orchestrate the universe. We live in a transitional era of profound pain and tragic identity quest, but the agony of our age is the labor pain of rebirth.

I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey. To be born in this age is a precious gift, and I regret the prospect of my own death only because I will leave so many pages of man's destiny -- if you will excuse the Gutenbergian image -- tantalizingly unread. But perhaps, as I've tried to demonstrate in my examination of the postliterate culture, the story begins only when the book closes."

"The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan", Playboy Magazine, March 1969.

Lew Mermelstein
lewm@ieee.org
June 22, 2002
Last revised 18:20GMT, June 23, 2002

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