Word: mcluhan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...have ever wondered why men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses, McLuhan again comes to the rescue. He knows why girls wear patterned or mesh stockings, why Germans make better nuclear physicists than Americans, why an American is repulsed when a foreigner carries on a conversation only three inches from the American's face, why there is such widespread distaste for the war in Vietnam, why some Arabs wear alarm clocks in their turbans to gain status...
...Many of McLuhan's ideas are surely wrong. He admits frequently that even he doesn't believe all of the things he says. But his approach is legitimate. McLuhan is no pop sociologist using stolen theories and distorted facts to grind out best-sellers. He is no charlatan...
...McLuhan barely disguises his dislike for the Gutenberg (Protestant) era. When contrasting the literate world of the book age with the preliterate medieval world, he harks back romantically to the corporate society of the middle ages when anomie was unknown and an organic society cared for all its children. Individualism and the curse of Protestantism destroyed the foundations of the corporate system, cutting the members loose from the protection they had enjoyed...
...McLuhan is a romantic, he ought to be an optimistic one, since he predicts that the electronic media will recreate the closed society. For centuries men grew more and more isolated, and the comfortable village, where privacy did not exist, seemed increasingly remote. When the villager learned to write he became an individual. He began to develop a private point of view. The world seemed to explode as the village learned of strange and unreachable people and places outside own circle...
...become faster. Telstar and Early Bird make it possible for Americans and Japanese and Russians, without even leaving their homes, to watch a soccer game in London while it is being played. Moving information at the speed of light has reversed the trend toward expansion of the world, and McLuhan suggests that the world will continue to shrink until we all live in a village again, a single, global village...