In our software world of instant electric communications movement, politics is shifting from the old patterns of political representation by electoral delegation to a new form of spontaneous and instantaneous communal involvement in all areas of decision making.<\/p>\n
Personal diversity is encouraged while at the same time everybody reacts and interacts simultaneously to every stimulus.<\/p>\n
Today the computer could program the media to determine the given messages a people should hear in terms of their over-all needs, creating a total media experience absorbed and patterned by all the senses.<\/p>\n
I see no possibility of a worldwide Luddite rebellion that will smash all machinery to bits, so we might as well sit back and see what is happening and what will happen to us in a cybernetic world. Resenting a new technology will not halt its progress.<\/p>\n
Man\u2019s relationship with his machinery is thus inherently symbiotic. This has always been the case; it\u2019s only in the electric age that man has an opportunity to recognize this marriage to his own technology.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m \u201cpredicting\u201d what has already happened and merely extrapolating a current process to its logical conclusion.<\/p>\n
The extensions of man\u2019s consciousness induced by the electric media could conceivably usher in the millennium, but it also holds the potential for realizing the Anti-Christ. <\/p>\n
The new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
— Marshall McLuhan, Playboy Interview, 1969<\/a><\/p>\n Tomorrow is Marshall McLuhan’s 100th birthday. What would McLuhan have done? A flash crowd meetup? Or republish an old interview from Playboy in 1969? I never tired of McLuhan’s rants. Here are a some excerpts from that interview. Remember this … Continue reading ![\"634295557175459083\"](\"https:\/\/kk.org\/thetechnium\/\/634295557175459083.jpg\")
Image from Joseph Barbacia<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"