Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness. 'Time' has ceased,
'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village ... a
simultaneous happening. ... Electric circuitry profoundly
involves men with one another. Information pours upon us,
instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is
acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer
information. Our electrically-configured world has forced us
to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of
pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-
block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that
all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a
state of active interplay.
The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new
situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects,
to the flavor the most recent past. We look at the present
through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
Suburbia lives imaginatively in Bonanza-land.
In the name of 'progress', our official culture is striving to
force the new media to do the work of the old.
---Marshall McLuhan |