LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
you copy? I’m wall-to-wall and treetop tall... What’s your handle, Good Buddy?” Except it lacks the intellectual depth. “...And that’s a big 10-4.” We’re just blithering. The brilliant media theory philosopher Marshall McLuhan said in 1964, “The medium is the message.” (Or, as my mom put it long before I’d heard of Marshall McLuhan, “It’s not what you say – it’s how you say it.”) If the medium is blather-by-the-billions , the message is a load of crap. Crap and vicious crap. Crap thrown with intent. McLuhan foresaw the World Wide Web almost 30 years before the fact. He was not sanguine about its “yackety-yackety-yak.” In his 1962 book, The Gutenberg Galaxy , McLuhan wrote: piece of science fiction... And as our senses have gone outside us... we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence... Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. McLuhan predicted that advances in electronic media would create a “Global Village.” At the time, a lot of us thought that was a swell idea... McLuhan didn’t. The world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile
In a 1977 program on Ontario TV, McLuhan was interviewed by Canadian journalist Mike McManus. McManus: But it seems, Dr. McLuhan, that this tribal world is not friendly. McLuhan: The closer you get together the more you like each other? There is no evidence of that in any situation we’ve ever heard of. When people get close together, they get more and more savage and impatient with each other. In the middle of the last century, there was a quaint idea that what the world needed was “communication.” If only parents and children could communicate , the Generation Gap would be bridged with a hug. If only white folks and black folks could communicate , the struggle for civil rights and integration would end in handshakes and backslapping. If only we had “cultural exchange” so that the ordinary people of the United States and the Soviet Union could communicate ... Therefore, an exceedingly dull publication called Soviet Life showed up in American public libraries. And a sort of bowdlerized version of Life magazine, Amerika , published by the U.S. State Department, showed up – or didn’t – somewhere – or not – in the U.S.S.R. (The Cold War was not noticeably defrosted.) All of which was nicely satirized in the 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke when prison warden Strother Martin beats the (decent and freedom-loving) crap out of Paul Newman
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August 2019
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