Marshall McLuhan was a seminal figure in pioneering the whole field of media studies. He defined media broadly as any technology, from the wheel to the woodcut and the washing machine, that might serve as a virtual “extension of ourselves.” He sought to map out or “probe” the totalizing psychological, cultural, and social environments created by any medium.

Alongside the more famous “hot versus cool media” dichotomy, he proposed a division between the “Western” or literate and the “tribal” or non-literate modes of awareness. McLuhan believed that the West was due for a period of “re-tribalization,” but by “tribal” he meant much more than the commonly understood definition.

Yes, there would be polarization: people would by and large become less civil, less rational, touchier, and more defensive about the smallest things. This much, we already know and see every day. But McLuhan went even further in his use of the term, arguing that electronic media—more so than any political ideology—shifts the sensorial basis of Western society away from the visual, the literate, and the abstract and toward the oral, the tactile, and the tribal.

In other words, he saw re-tribalization as a process that will eventually return modern man to the mental and epistemic world of his pre-literate tribal ancestors: the “global village.”

As the growing oral-tribal segments of society brushes up against the old literate structures that govern them, there will be no end of tension, trauma, and misunderstanding. This is because the electronic tribalism McLuhan described, whatever its positive traits when taken on its own, poses a mortal threat to the values and assumptions of the still-dominant literate, liberal civilization.

A society becomes post-literate when electronic media compresses its experience of literacy to such an extreme degree that the simultaneity of the oral replaces the sequentalism of the typographic as the dominant pattern of thought and sense-making.

The coming of new iterations of electronic media, such as cable news in the late 1980s, the internet in the 1990s, and social media in the 2010s, ensured the definitive end of literacy’s hegemony over public communication. The laissez-faire attitude of the times encouraged dramatic media atomization, sealing the destruction of the rational, centralized, and well-regulated information architecture of the old literate world. This led to today’s epistemic anarchy and has spurred attempts to re-establish literate-era discipline and the public legibility of online interaction under the guise of making the internet “accountable.”

The coming of new iterations of electronic media, such as cable news in the late 1980s, the internet in the 1990s, and social media in the 2010s, ensured the definitive end of literacy’s hegemony over public communication. The laissez-faire attitude of the times encouraged dramatic media atomization, sealing the destruction of the rational, centralized, and well-regulated information architecture of the old literate world. This led to today’s epistemic anarchy and has spurred attempts to re-establish literate-era discipline and the public legibility of online interaction under the guise of making the internet “accountable.”

Originally Posted By Channel83⏩

Originally Posted By katya422⏩

Originally Posted By Channel83⏩

Being primarily symbolic and amorphous, they [modern slogans] dwell not in the outer world of institutions but in the inner world of identity and feeling:

“Make America Great Again!” “Black Lives Matter!” “Keep America Great!” “I Can’t Breathe!” “All Lives Matter!” “Build the Wall!” “Own the Libs!” “No Ban, No Wall!” “Abolish ICE!” “Defund the Police!” “Lock Her Up!” “Resist!” “Silence is Violence!” “Stop the Steal!”

Not unlike the spells of the Kikuyu, the power of these words to impose their assumptions relentlessly lies in their simply being said and repeated. Such incantations can exert their magic both in real life, at a rally or protest, or in the virtual world of social media—which, like the vital but disembodied spirit realm visited by the shaman, often seems to shape and supersede reality itself. In describing the constructs of oral power, McLuhan recalled Joyce: “Rite words in rote order.”