of Toronto, Canada>
Processes, more than ideas, affect and shape our lives today. That is the
reason why McLuhan's Understanding Media demands re-reading. It made
history and hysteria in the sixties but re-reading it now makes one
understand the puzzling changes in our and other societies around the world.
McLuhan invented The Global Village that has been currently taken
over by Big Business but essentially McLuhan had studied the impact of
electronic media and machines on the organized, Western and westernizing
societies everywhere.
According to McLuhan, whenever a new technology enters our world, it alters our
perceptions. Western Man got used to print technology that overemphasized
visuality. Later the newspaper, microphone speaker and film
created nations and political leaders and culture heroes. They also imposed
on Man a culture of centralization. They were in McLuhanic terminology hot media. Now, the cool media like TV and other electronic
technologies are decentralizing and tribalizing Man.
McLuhan's book offers us insights into the impact of gadgets and tools of
modern times on human environment and human beings. Roads, Paper Routes,
Housing, the Automobile, Telephone, and Aeroplane all are causing deep
realignment of our sensorium as extensions of our own senses. Says McLuhan
while opening his chapter on Housing: "If clothing is an
extension of our private skins to store and channel our own heat and energy,
housing is a collective means of achieving the same end for the family or the
group. Housing as shelter is an extension of bodily heat-control mechanisms-
collective skin or garment. Cities are an even further extension..."
As an Asian, I find his observations on India and China of special interest.
Western policy makers can gain a lot from McLuhan while dealing with Oral
Cultures and Illiterate Masses in Islamic Society today.”... of all the great
hybrid unions that breed furious release of energy and change, there is none to
surpass the meeting of literate and oral cultures. With literacy now about to
hybridize the cultures of the Chinese, the Indians and the Africans, we are
about to experience such a release of human power and aggressive violence as
makes the previous history of phonetic alphabet technology seem quite tame"
This explains the Islamic madness and frenzy over the Mohammed cartoons
recently published in a newspaper in Denmark. Re-reading McLuhan's UNDERSTANDING MEDIA
will help better understanding and living in The Global Village.
Dr. Jitendra Kumar Sharma, M.A. , Ph.D. Toronto, Canada>
New Delhi, India