MCLUHAN
439
visual man" read citified American man before his electric resurrection,
and for "oral-aural man" read all those political and cultural enemies
(except the Eskimos?) who confront him at home and abroad. The
subliminal bias isn't of course an expression of political or social doc–
trine - McLuhan doesn't much care whether it's the Negro world or
the Klan that makes us sweat; just so long as we do so.
His ambivalence toward electric civilization seems quite genuine.
It is the perfection of human interinvolvement, the abolition of open
spaces and prairie silences, linear horizons and straight roads leading
nowhere much; but it is also the hideous epitome of everything con–
temptible about an Americanized world, the cellophane and plastic
brothel McLuhan icily visited in
The Mechanical Bride.
Electric Amer–
ica is where you want to go, and where you despise yourself for being.
McLuhan sings the new environment by stressing just those qualities
that, he well knows, will most distress those who cling to the old sense-–
ratios, and there is surely a touch of self-punishment in this:
There is more diversity, less conformity under a single roof in any
family than there is with the thousands of families in the same
city. The more you create village conditions, the more discon–
tinuity and division and diversity. The global village absolutely in–
sures maximal disagreement on all points. It neVer occurred to me
that uniformity and tranquillity were the properties of the global
village. It has more spite and envy. The spaces and times are
pulled out from between people. A world in which people encounter
each other in depth all the time.
The tribal-global village is far more divisive - full of fighting–
than any nationalism ever was. Village is fission, not fusion, in
depth. People leave small towns to
avoid
involvement. The big city
lined
[lured?] them with its uniformity and impersonal milieu. They
sought propriety and in the city, money is made by uniformity and
repeatability. Where you have craftsmanlike diversity, you make
art, not money. The village is not the place to find ideal peace
and harmony. Exact opposite. Nationalism came out of print and
provided an extraordinary relief from global village conditions.
I don't
approve
of the global village. I say we live in it.
Whatever the remarks about money and art may mean, the last sen–
tences are clear enough. "We" must signify "we urbanized Americans,"
as opposed to the Russians and Ghanians and Alabamans who remain
oral-aural, exempted from our fall into typographic individualism and
thus spared the painful heat of our reentry, so to speak, into a tribal
atmosphere that is all the more dangerous to those who have once left it.
But of course there's a more hopeful version of Global Village. In
Understanding Media
and
The Medium is the Massage
the tone is
