There’s a certain irony about learning from Marshall McLuhan through YouTube, but here is a remarkable piece of archive footage from 1960 where McLuhan introduces us to the notion of the global village, re-tribalisation and how electric media are extending our sensory capabilities.

This is 1960 remember. Television was only ten years old. My family had to wait, and save, for another three years to get a black and white set. Racial segregation was still legally sanctioned in the US and in London people were marching against the H-bomb. There were as yet, no hippies, no Africa decolonisation, no student protests in Paris … Yet, Marshall McLuhan was introducing notions about print and electronic media that we are only beginning to get to grips with now – 50 years later. This is what he said:

in the old print media people were not ‘with it’  they were away from it, by themselves, with their own private point of view. Now you have no point of view when you’re with it because you accept the thing totally. And we’re with it because these new media of ours … have made our world into a single unit. The world is now like a continually sounding tribal drum where everybody gets the message all the time. A princess gets married in England and — boom boom boom! — we all hear about it; an earthquake in North Africa; a Hollywood star gets drunk — away go the drums again.

And the consequences of this change towards tribal drums? The move towards the collective mind or what is now often referred to as the hive mind:

Everything we talk about tonight points away from individual man and toward tribal man – the man created by the new electronic media. We’re re-tribalising. Involuntarily, we’re getting rid of individualism … just as books and their private point of view are being replaced by new media, so the concepts that underly our social life are changing. We’re no longer so concerned with self definition, with finding our own individual way. We’re more concerned with what the group knows, of feeling as it does, of acting with it, not apart from it.

Ultimately, new media introduce new ways of thinking:

The media are at the heart of our life because the media work through our senses. And print is a medium. It changed our sense make up from what it had been in the Middle Ages and now these other media will do the same. The (the photograph, movies, the radio and TV) change the way we see, hear, touch or feel oursleves and our world. A change in one of our five senses changes the ratio among all the rest. People begin to want and appreciate different things and to think differently.