Basic McLuhan

The clear vision of the Canadian Marshall McLuhan, who displayed his reflections and thoughts from the 40's until the very beginning of the 80's, is getting practically inside our daily lives, in what has been conceived theoretically by McLuhan, some 10 to 20 years ago, as the Electric Era, which followed his other two main-basic stages of humankind defined as follows:
  1. The pre-literate era, with its mystique of violence and brutalities.
  2. The literate times, developed after the Gutenberg Galaxy, especially with the Medieval and Renaissance periods, and the much later "printing press" and,
  3. The electric era which, during more of less a whole Century, has prepared us for living it, to the fullest, in our present times.

Never as in the late 90s have we been able to approach the impacts and the worldwide meaning of a new Century beginning at the ending also of a new Millenium.

Never as today, right in the middle of 1997, has the human being so clearly perceived the basic principles outlined by Marshall McLuhan, after the deep changes in our society brought about by the electric era in which we are really living today.

The following "trends" are the main basic impacts which drive our daily lives throughout the electric era:

  1. A general move towards Decentralization
  2. Just at the same time, an integrative process, more and more acute every day.
  3. A generalized tendency towards increasing acceleration of all the social components of life on earth.

Those basic, main and common trends, which pierce all the stages of our society, as well as all the geographical areas of our planet, were neatly described and outlined by Marshall McLuhan some 10 to 20 years ago.

Today, in the second part of the 90s and towards the end of the Century and the Millenium, all those assertions can be tested simply by quoting such clear writings, almost page by page, in the many works of Mashall McLuhan and especially in the following ones: The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto 1962); Culture is our business (New York, 1970); D'oeil à oreille (Montreal, 1969); The Global Village (re-print, New York, 1989) and the Medium is the Message: An Inventory of Effects (New York, 1967).