War and Peace in the Global Village

This classic, WAR & PEACE, attempts to awaken the reader to the realities of media that lie hidden in his own mind. These realities are composed of the everything in the current "electric world," of signs, of real words and nonsense sounds, of pictures, of stuff, of technologies, of clothes, of weapons, of food, and of chemicals, all of which McLuhan calls media and the extensions of man. Can the reader who knows nothing of the pre-electric world be awakened to perceive it? A difficult question since there are all kinds of readers from the primitive to the scientist to the computer programmer. Indeed, McLuhan and Fiore take the reader on a impossible journey into the guts and gear works of the human brain. Did the Authors bridge any gaps or just create new, unknown ones? Everything about this book is difficult. This includes the often obscure passages on every other page from Joyce's FINNEGANS WAKE. The Authors advance the notion that all behavior, war and violence, stems from man's search for his identity. "So that today war, as it were, has become the little Red Schoolhouse of the global village."(P. 125) War has become the educator and education becomes war. "No one has studied what degree of innovation is required to shatter the self image of a man or a society." And how can man understand himself when he is always engaged in "rearview mirrorism?" Man looks backward because he can't see forward. In addition, all the media surrounding man is merely raw material for man's info processor, his brain. Thus man is hooked on his current media like a drug addict is hooked on that which alters his sensual input. Man, himself, is but a collection of information. Immersed in this sea of info, like a fish in water, how can man sort out those bits that beg for priority? By understanding the info that composes himself, can man escape his own senses, those that compose and shape his every move? One doubts it!

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan does a double take on the Massage by doubling his informative view of the media world splicing effect after effect after effect. Beginning locally in the village of small tribal cultures of oratory dominance demonstrating the break of the sensorium which created a tactile society. Moving through history as if fragmented in its own way recapitulating the effects of media which broke up the senses and amputated the limbs of our physical and psychical systems. Although written in 1968, McLuhan moves right into the present times understanding first, electricity as extension of the nervous system and lucidly stating that LSD, the psychedelics of the past are equal in effects to the modern day computer as a recomposure of our being. From our computer realities, one can easily define theirs as an integrated inter-net, linking one another through digital media that is light speed. McLuhan understood the implications of Einsteinian-ENIAC models of the world and distupted the passive television view with this commercial interuption to wake up the senses. Reccomended for McLuhan lovers and those who are still watching TV on a regular basis.

Once again, McLuhan and Fiore team up to provide us with an excellent summation of all of the drastic effects of the transition to electric circutry as the prime form of media. I recommend reading The Medium is the Massage first.

If McLuhan hadn't been dead for almost twenty years, he could have written this book yesterday. He speaks to this moment in time. "We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies." He makes the point that we have met the enemy and they is us. He asserts that man has evolved beyond Darwin's limited concept of biological evolution, and we have evolved ourselves with our technology. The computer being an extension of our nervous system, which now senses the whole world. The pain of modern existence is to be found in the strain of this evolution, and therefor, to be for-warned is to be for-armed. "Unlike the animals, man has no nature but his own history. Electronically, this total history is now potentially present in a kind of simultaneous transparency that carries us into a world of what Joyce calls 'heliotropic noughttime.' We have been rapt in 'the artifice of eternity' by placing our nervous system around the entire globe." Tired of wondering why you think life sucks? There is some healing balm hear to be found.