{"id":7096,"date":"2016-06-15T09:31:14","date_gmt":"2016-06-15T15:31:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=7096"},"modified":"2016-06-26T09:11:08","modified_gmt":"2016-06-26T15:11:08","slug":"the-global-village-of-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=7096","title":{"rendered":"The global village of violence"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"facebook-angry\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We assume that\u00a0communication and harmony go hand in hand, like a pair of flower children on\u00a0a garden path. If only we all could\u00a0share our\u00a0thoughts and feelings with everyone else all the time, we’d overcome our distrust and fear and live together peaceably. We’d see that we\u00a0are all one. Facebook and other social media disabuse us of this notion.\u00a0To be “all one” is to be dissolved \u2014 and for many\u00a0people that is\u00a0a threat that requires a reaction.<\/p>\n

Eamonn Fitzgerald points<\/a> to a recently uploaded video of a Canadian TV interview with Marshall McLuhan that aired in\u00a01977. By the mid-seventies, a decade\u00a0after his allotted minutes of\u00a0fame, McLuhan had come to be\u00a0dismissed as a mumbo-jumbo-spewing charlatan by the intelligentsia. What the intelligentsia found particularly irritating\u00a0was that\u00a0the mumbo jumbo McLuhan spewed fit no piety and often hit\u00a0uncomfortably close to\u00a0the mark.<\/p>\n

Early on in the clip, the interviewer notes that McLuhan had long ago predicted that electronic\u00a0communication systems would turn the world into\u00a0a global village. Most of McLuhan’s early readers had taken\u00a0this as a utopian prophecy. “But it seems,” the interviewer\u00a0says, with surprise, “that this tribal world is not very friendly.” McLuhan responds:<\/p>\n

The closer you get together, the more you like each other? There is no evidence of that in any situation that we have ever heard of. When people get close together, they get more and more savage and impatient with each other. [Man’s]\u00a0tolerance is tested in those narrow circumstances very much. Village people are not that much in love with each other. The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Instantaneous, universal communication is at least as\u00a0likely to breed nationalism, xenophobia, and cultism as it is to breed\u00a0harmony and fellow-feeling, McLuhan argues. As\u00a0media\u00a0dissolve individual identity, people rush to join\u00a0“little groups” as a way to\u00a0reestablish a\u00a0sense of\u00a0themselves, and they’ll go to extremes to\u00a0defend their group identity, sometimes twisting<\/a> the medium to their ends:<\/p>\n

Ordinary people find the need for violence as they lose their identities. It is only the threat to people\u2019s identity that makes them violent. Terrorists, hijackers \u2014\u00a0these are people minus identity. They are determined to make it somehow, to get coverage, to get noticed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s simplistic\u00a0\u2014 to a man with a media theory, everything looks like a media effect \u2014\u00a0but it’s not wrong.<\/p>\n

People in all times have been this way.\u00a0In our time, when things happen very quickly, there\u2019s very little time to adjust to new situations at the speed of light. There is little time to get accustomed to anything.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With perfect communication comes perfect surveillance, McLuhan goes on to say, and that, too, tends to dissolve private identity:<\/p>\n

We now have the means to keep everybody under surveillance. No matter what part of the world they are in, we can put them under surveillance. This has become one of the main occupations of mankind, just watching other people and keeping a record of their goings on.\u00a0…\u00a0Everybody has become porous. The light and the message go right through us.<\/p>\n

At this moment, we are on the air. We do not have any physical body. When you\u2019re on the telephone or on radio or on T.V., you don\u2019t have a physical body \u2014\u00a0you\u2019re just an image on the air. When you don\u2019t have a physical body, you\u2019re a discarnate being. You have a very different relation to the world around you. I think this has been one of the big effects of the electric age. It has deprived people really of their identity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Anticipating Simon Reynolds’s Retromania<\/em><\/a>, McLuhan also ties the dissolution of personal identity to culture’s turn toward nostalgia:<\/p>\n

By the way, one of the big parts of the loss of identity is nostalgia. So there are revivals in every phase of life today. Revivals of clothing, of dances, of music, of shows, of everything. We live by the revival. It tells us who we are or were.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Everyone needs to be someone, for better or worse.<\/p>\n