
Digital Tribalism – The Real Story About Fake News - imartin2k
http://www.ctrl-verlust.net/digital-tribalism-the-real-story-about-fake-news/
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Fricken
Here's an excerpt from a 1977 interview with Marshall McLuhan hosted by Mike
McManus:

Mike: Way back in the early fifties you predicted that the world was becoming
a global Village.

Marshall: We are going back into the bicameral mind that is tribal,
collective, without any individual consciousness.

Mike: But, it seems, Dr. McLuhan, that this tribal world is not friendly.

Marshall: No, tribal people, one of their main kinds of sport is butchering
each other. It is a full-time sport in tribal societies. But, I had some idea
as we got global and tribal we were going to try to - The closer you get
together, the more you like each other? There is no evidence of that in any
situation that we have ever heard of. When people get close together, they get
more and more savage and impatient with each other.

Mike: Why is it? Is it because of the nature of man?

Marshall: His tolerance is tested in those narrow circumstances very much.
Village people are not that much in love with each other. The global village
is a place of a very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.

Mike: Do you see any pattern of this in, for example the desires of Quebec to
separate?

Marshall: I should think that they are feeling very abrasive about the English
community and about the way the American south felt about the Yankee north a
hundred years ago.

Mike: Is this going to be a pattern right around the world?

Marshall: Apparently, separatisms are very frequent all over the globe at the
present time. Every country in the world is loaded with regionalistic and
nationalistic little groups.

Mike: But in Quebec for example, like do you define it as the quest for
identity?

Marshall: Yes, all forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live
out on the frontier, you have no identity. You are a nobody. Therefore, you
get very tough. You have to prove that you are somebody. So you become very
violent. Identity is always accompanied by violence. This seems paradoxical to
you? Ordinary people find the need for violence as they lose their identities.
It is only the threat to people’s identity that makes them violent.
Terrorists, hijackers \- these are people minus identity. They are determined
to make it somehow, to get coverage, to get noticed.

Mike: And all this is somehow an effect of the electronic age?

Marshall: No, but people in all times have been this way. In our time,
whenthings happen very quickly, there’s very little time to adjust to new
situations at the speed of light. There is little time to get accustomed to
anything. Even radio has sent tribal societies around the globe up the wall
with intensity of feeling. One of the major violence makers of our century has
been radio. Hitler was entirely a radio man and a tribal man.

Mike: Then, what does television do to that tribal man?

Marshall: Well, I don’t think Hitler would have lasted long on TV. Like
Senator Joe McCarthy, he would have looked foolish. McCarthy was a very hot
character and like Nixon, he made a very bad image on television. He was far
too hot a character. He would have been much better on radio.

The investigations now of the CIA, the FBI and even our own, God forbid, RCMP,
has this anything to do with the electronic age? Yes, because we now have the
means to keep everybody under surveillance. No matter what part of the world
they are in, we can put them under surveillance. This has become one of the
main occupations of mankind, just watching other people and keeping a record
of their goings on.

Mike: And invading privacy.

Marshall: Yes, in fact, just ignoring it. Everybody has become porous. The
light and the the message go right through us. At this moment, we are on the
air. We do not have any physical body. When you’re on the telephone or on
radio or on T.V., you don’t have a physical body - you’re just an image on the
air.

When you don’t have a physical body, you’re a discarnate being. You have a
very different relation to the world around you. I think this has been one of
the big effects of the electric age. It has deprived people really of their
identity.

Mike: So that’s what this is doing to me?

Marshall: Yes. Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the
speed of light. It’s called being mass man. By the way, one of the big parts
of the loss of identity is nostalgia. So there are revivals in every phase of
life today. Revivals of clothing, of dances, of music, of shows, of
everything. We live by the revival. It tells us who we are or were.

[http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/media/mcluhan_pdf_11_fN...](http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/media/mcluhan_pdf_11_fNfqnAl.pdf)

~~~
imartin2k
Shockingly spot-on.

~~~
Fricken
I don't know anybody who has better insight into what's going on right now
than a guy who died in 1980 and had most of his big ideas in the 50s and 60s.

I guess nothing fundamental has changed since the early days of television,
the major difference is that then we were knee deep in it and now we're neck
deep.

