Sublime

For McLuhan this was prerequisite to the creation of global consciousness—global knowing. “Today,” he wrote, “we have extended our central nervous systems in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation of consciousness,

We face the rapid dissolution of the assumptions of an education organized around the slow-moving printed word, and the equally rapid emergence of a new education based on the speed-of-light electronic image.

McLuhan noted that “when information moves at the speed of signals in the central nervous system, man is confronted with the obsolescence of all earlier forms of acceleration, such as road and rail. What emerges is a total field of inclusive awareness. The old patterns of psychic and social adjustment become irrelevant.”

(My 93-year-old mother has kept her subscription to the Washington Post strictly because she loves the crossword puzzles. I have shown her websites teeming with crossword puzzles, but she remains unmoved. My mother wants her bundle, and belongs to the last generation to do so.) Information sought a less grandiose, less industrial level of circulati

McLuhan’s depiction of modern life as a global village and ‘one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetting and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early “mistakes”’ could have been written for the social media age.

On the simplest level, television prioritizes visual images and the spoken word over written text, as Neil Postman argued in the influential book Amusing Ourselves to Death, written during the heyday of the TV era.