Part 4/4 : War and Peace in the Global Village(McLuhan, Fiore 1968)
- Space-race : 'Projecting missiles into outer space is no different from the activities of Columbus and Magellan' (Note : rear-view mirror again)
- War = 'quest for recovery of identity and respect' (Note : WW2 looked back to WW1 and German defeat)
- America (Note : 1968 here) : the rise of 'electric technology' upset those countries which had 'had a 19th century', the new tribal boys on the block accelerating their development thanks to this
- WAR : American Civil War = 1st railway war
- WW1 = railway war too
- WW2 = an industrial and radio war which woke up the tribal past of Europeans (Note : Hitler's effective use of radio); not in USA, 'the most visually-organised country in the history of the world', where everything is based on 'goal-oriented' phonetic literacy (except 'negros', jazz)
- 1930s : Radio was a disaster for a goal-oriented America (need for simplicity, not the complexity of radio)
- With the spread of T.V., we are entering an invisible environment and the Vietnam war is 'being fought in the American home itself'. (Note : compare and contrast with embedded journalism in the Fawkland and Iraq wars of '80s and '00s)
- To youth, all wars are anathema; preference for the non-rational, non-melodic (John Cage) (Note : hippies, freaks, drug culture...)
- The individual is helpless to change the effects of new environments (Note : mobile phones rule)
- Read (as I did in my youth), 'Siddharta', by Hermann Hesse (Note : or any Carlos Castaneda book)
- Education = aggression
- Children can learn a language in 1 or 2 years because it is an environment ('total field approach')
- Advertising = declaration of war against customers, a ' massive barrage against human sensibilities'
- "Finnegan's Wake" (JJ) : 'Love my label like myself'
- Fashion = 'the Bore war' ? Clothing as power. No fashion in native societies (group, not individual)
- Importance of 'tactility', anti-fashion of the Hippie (Note : and the mini-skirt, McLuhan ?)
- Nudity = sculptural, tactile
- Tribal societies avoid anti-environments, living in a form of collective dream
- Fish know nothing about water, for there is no anti-environment to compare it to. A fish is a fish in water.
- 'Unlike animals, Man has no nature but his own history'. Nature has become content (of the man-made environment)
- We live in a 'highly individualistic and literate society' in which only the artists see the environment
- Quotes : 'Stock exchanges will disappear under the impact of the computer in a few years', or 'Within 10 years New York will have been dismantled'; Only anti-gravitational transport will exist (Note : !)
- The USA 'is a grossly underdeveloped country' (productive power aside)
- 'To the pre-literate man...a fable is what we would call a major scientific truth'
- The 'self-amputations of man' are the extensions of his body...and his nervous system, which we call technologies
- 'All media or technologies, languages as much as weaponry, create new environments or habitats, which become the milieux for new species or technologies'
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