What Is Happening?

If you’ve looked around recently, you might notice that things have changed. We talk incessantly about the lack of a political consensus and about polarization. But is there really any unity anymore? Everyone is angry, and people seem to interact with each other less than ever. How did we get here? To analyze this question, let us turn to the theories of Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan.

McLuhan’s philosophy focused on media, that is, means of communication, and his works are notable for their farsighted understanding of modern media. He argued that the present age we are living in is the electronic age, and that the transition to the new age was the entry into the “global village,” a term which he coined. Back in the 1960s, he envisioned a world in which everyone was connected to everyone else, where information could be conveyed instantaneously, where time and space no longer reigned supreme.

McLuhan died in 1980, not living long enough to see the dawn of the internet and the fulfillment of his analysis and predictions about the media of the electric age. Nevertheless, his insights proved astonishingly accurate. When McLuhan mentions the global village, he does not have in mind a world that is devoid of conflict and strife. In fact, he believed that the exact opposite would be true.

In McLuhan’s estimation, the creation of the global village creates the possibility for maximal disagreement between everyone. Even as we grow more connected, this leads to an ever increasing amount of diversity. If we have access to everything all at once, how much easier is it to pick and choose what we are interested in? Ironically, the very systems that brought us together are also what tear us apart.

McLuhan also foresaw the consequences of modern, for lack of a better term, cancel culture. He described electronic information devices that would act as “one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early ‘mistakes’.” Even as we grow further apart, we become more and more unwitting agents of social change, policing the global village.

We at once witness the atomization of society, as well as its melding into a giant hive mind. Essentially, McLuhan’s insights explain to us that we can not approach society in the same ways that we have in the past. Media has become totally powerful, a far cry from the agency produced in the age where print media was the dominant form of communication. He declared the death of the public, many individual viewpoints coming to a consensus. Now we have “the mass audience” bombarded with an endless stream of information, being shaped and molded to direct their participation in society.

Although McLuhan has keen insights into media and the way that it totally works over society, he did not have a utopian vision of the future. He was a devout Catholic, and he was actually entirely opposed to the social upheaval that he saw all around him. However, he recognized that if we were to have a chance to succeed in the modern world, he had to understand the way the world worked. And, more than most, he did understand it.