Introduction
You live in a time of intense disorientation as new media shatter old certainties. Technologies accelerate faster than your habits can adapt, leaving you trapped in rear-view mirrorism while the world transforms beneath you.
Marshall McLuhan argues in War and Peace in the Global Village that electronic media dissolve traditional visual space into total acoustic environments. This shift inflicts profound psychological pain and fundamentally restructures human awareness and conflict.
The following exploration examines how sensory ratios shape your world.
- How does the phonetic alphabet create uniform visual space?
- Why does new technology invariably trigger war and social restructuring?
- How do you program an automated global environment without losing your identity?
1. Visual Space and Sensory Adaptation
The Phonetic Alphabet and Visual Space
Only phonetically literate humans live in a rational, uniform, and pictorial space. This specific environment is a unique product of the phonetic alphabet.
Ancient Greece developed Euclidean space and visual specialism through phonetic literacy. Hebraic, Arabic, and Chinese forms of writing did not produce this continuous and connected visual space. You inhabit an environment conditioned by this ancient technological invention.
Sensory Pain and Adaptation
New technological environments inflict profound psychological and physical pain on perceivers. These innovations disrupt established sensory balances and force sudden neurological adjustments.
New technological environments inflict profound psychological and physical pain on perceivers by disrupting established sensory balances.
You experience cultural pain and phantom pain when adjusting to new mediums like print, radio, and television. This trauma resembles the shock of sudden recovery from blindness.
Otto Lowenstein observed patients blind from childhood who gained vision through surgery. These individuals initially experienced a flat extension of meaningless patches of light and dark. They shrank from the welter of additional stimulation before learning to make sense of it.
You face a similar chaotic stimulus when electronic media displace older visual habits. Rear-view mirrorism traps your attention in familiar patterns while the world transforms beneath you.
Fashion acts as the poor man's art and fills the vacuum in human senses created by these technological displacements. In sensory terms, fashion has an inevitability about it. It serves as an adjustment to a man-made world and an expression of sensory response much like hit tunes and entertainments.
James Joyce gives fashion a key role through the Prankquean in Finnegans Wake. In this work, clothing functions as weaponry and anti-environmental adjustment.
2. Technology, War, and Feudalism
War has historically been the primary motivational force and basic incentive driving scientific discovery and technological innovation.
While modern society values pure science, significant discoveries about the natural world are inspired by real or imaginary military necessities. Every major advance, from iron and steel to atomic particles and space capsules, was initiated by weapon requirements.
The transistor radio grew from military communications, the assembly line from Civil War firearms needs, and the lawn-mower from Leonardo da Vinci's revolving scythe.
When new technology strikes a society, the immediate reaction is to cling to familiar and comforting images from the preceding period rather than confronting the present. Society suffers from a shattered image and anxiety when innovation exceeds past levels. You resort to rear-view mirrorism, treating advanced programs like space exploration with nineteenth-century mentalities.
Desmond Morris noted that the NASA space program is Newtonian and obsolete, functioning as a modern budget for Bonanza rather than a twentieth-century program.
The Stirrup and Feudalism
The introduction of the stirrup revolutionized warfare and reshaped medieval society by making mounted shock combat and specialized armored knights possible. Because heavy armor and specialized horses required large expenditures and professional training, the introduction of the stirrup destroyed the old Germanic idea of every freeman as a soldier and replaced strip-farming with feudal land-tenure.
In 761, Isanhard sold his ancestral lands and a slave for a horse and a sword, illustrating the extreme cost of military equipment.
Other costs were similarly demanding:
- 20 oxen or plough-teams of at least 10 peasant families was the general cost of military equipment for one man.
- 1066 is the date William the Conqueror planted the stirrup in English soil at Hastings.
3. The Electronic Age and Human Purpose
The computer extends the human central nervous system into an automated global environment, requiring deliberate human programming and decentralization rather than rear-view mirrorism.
Marshall McLuhan notes that mechanical tools extend specific limbs, but the computer extends the central nervous system. This electronic circuitry relies on feedback and programs global environments. You watch these changes transform business and social structures.
Satellites put a man-made environment around the planet. This technological envelope ended nature in the traditional sense.
- 15% to 50% is the expected dollar volume growth range for many computer manufacturers.
The Computer as Nervous System Extension
Animals possess a fixed nature, but your existence is a task of making rather than matching. You require artificial anti-environments to understand reality.
Because electronic technology expands the nervous system globally, nature becomes the content of a man-made environment. You have no nature but your history, which requires deliberate programming and artistic vision.
José Ortega y Gasset noted that for man, existing means having the possibility and effort to accomplish a personal program. You must construct your life as an active task.
Universal Capitalism and Decentralization
The shift from hardware machinery to electronic software drives total decentralization. You see this transformation reshape economic organization and reduce the need for welfare.
A universal capitalist economy aims to distribute wealth through second incomes derived from productive capacity. This structure reduces public welfare and private charity to an absolute minimum while restoring human dignity.
Louis Kelso and Patricia Hetter argue in Two-Factor Theory that economic planning should extend the power to produce wealth to all households. Wealth should grow through productive power rather than distribution based merely on need.
4. Identity, Education, and Environment
Complex skills and environments transform human identity rapidly when approached as total fields rather than fragmented data, mirroring the quest for meaning through art and ritual.
Education as Environmental Immersion
You master complex skills quickly when presented as total environments instead of fragmented and classified data. Children learn languages fast because language functions as an environment rather than a collection of rules.
Dean Archibald MacKinnon exposed jungle natives to four-engine jet airplanes. Within three to four months, those uninitiated individuals could fly, assemble, and repair them. During World War II, Eskimo hunters served as top air force technicians by treating complex machinery as an integral field.
Survival depends on how you adapt to total fields rather than isolated fragments. Scantily clad natives face twenty-four hours survival time without food and water. Heavily clad Eskimos endure six to seven days survival time without food and water in harsh conditions.
The Role of the Artist
You find that the artist welcomes and explores perceptual innovations of new technological environments without the pain felt by ordinary people. Political and educational establishments feel anarchy and despair. The artist exults in discovering new boundaries, territories, and corporate and private identities brought by technological shifts.
Hieronymus Bosch painted the confusion of spaces resulting from the Gutenberg technology invasion of the old tactile medieval world.
Violence and self-denial function as quests for identity and territoriality. They mirror the adolescent search for meaning in an alienated mechanical world.
Hermann Hesse describes an ascetic journey of self-denial and extreme fasting in the novel Siddhartha. The protagonist follows this with an immersion in the material world to discover the self through direct experience rather than escaping inputs.
Siddhartha gave away his clothes and fasted for fourteen and twenty-eight days. He later immersed himself in business with Kamaswami while treating wealth as a game.
10 Key Ideas
- Marshall McLuhan argues in War and Peace in the Global Village that electronic media dissolve traditional visual space into total acoustic environments, inflicting profound psychological pain and restructuring human awareness.
- Only phonetically literate humans live in a rational, uniform, and pictorial space created uniquely by the phonetic alphabet.
- New technological environments inflict profound psychological and physical pain on perceivers by disrupting established sensory balances and forcing sudden neurological adjustments.
- War has historically been the primary motivational force and basic incentive driving scientific discovery and technological innovation.
- The introduction of the stirrup revolutionized warfare and reshaped medieval society by making mounted shock combat and specialized armored knights possible.
- The computer extends the human central nervous system into an automated global environment, requiring deliberate human programming and decentralization rather than rear-view mirrorism.
- Satellites put a man-made environment around the planet and ended nature in the traditional sense, leaving you with no nature but your history.
- A universal capitalist economy aims to distribute wealth through second incomes derived from productive capacity, reducing public welfare and private charity to an absolute minimum.
- You master complex skills quickly when presented as total environments instead of fragmented and classified data.
- The artist welcomes and explores perceptual innovations of new technological environments without the pain felt by ordinary people, exulting in discovering new boundaries.