The Global Village - The Shock of Recognition

It really is the shock of recognition once you grok what’s going on in the world at the moment. You see, once upon a time there was a brilliant and clever man by the name of Marshall McLuhan. You may have heard of him. He wrote a particularly intellectually hip and as it turned out famous book called The Medium is The Massage which people often insist on calling The Medium is the Message. You of course now have the opportunity to avoid making this common mistake. Which will just go to show that you were paying attention when it mattered. McLuhan wrote The Medium back in the 1960s and it’s full of quotable quotes that you could sit around in a cafe fantasizing that you had said yourself . . .except you didn’t. Such is the shock of recognition.

McLuhan in fact said this: The shock of recognition! In an electronic information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained – ignored. Too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels committment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.

He said this of course way before Adbusters extended a general invitation to concerned global citizens to Occupy Wall Street. About 50 years before actually. So it’s no surprise that he also coined the term Global Village. Here’s what McLuhan said in 1962 The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

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