THE GOBAL VILLAGE
-transformation in world life and media
By M. McLuhan and B. R. Powers
Because there always is a periods of painful change, every generation views the world in the past. People spend their lives inspired and modelled upon the past. The Renaissance man lived in the middle ages and we live in the nineteenth century (pp viii). The Global village is a book that never has the final answer but rather brings the past into the present with the purpose of seeing an alternative future, a future that is moving rapidly towards a more customised economy (ix). In McLuhan’s eyes the world was going through major change both physically and mentally, in fact the changes where so great that that he thought that a new frame of reference was needed. In the Global Village McLuhan presents a triad of new concepts: visual space, acoustic space and the tetrad.
Visual and Acoustic space
After the collapse of the oral tradition in early Greece humans have been thought that everything has a vanishing point and everything is arranged according to this, in other words we have a linear way of thinking. Every experience we have is absorbed through our eyes, and our senses of touch and hearing is suppressed. It was however not always like this. The caveman, the mountain Greek and the Indian hunter had for thousands of years before this a different way of seeing things. They lived in a world where objects resonated with each other. Life was like being inside a sphere. Tribal life then and now is like a 3D chess game, free of pyramidical ways of thinking (pp 36). McLuhan describes visual space as the mind set of the western civilization developed in the last 4000 years. It is a way of thinking that emphasizes the operation of the left hemisphere of the brain and which, in the process, glorifies quantative reasoning. Acoustic space is a projection of the right hemisphere of the human brain. It is built on holism, the ideal that there is no cardinal centre, but rather many centres floating around honouring diversity. Simultaneous understanding, or “integral awareness�, can be seen in the tetrad. McLuhan invented the tetrad as a tool for cultural assessment of the shift between visual and acoustic space. Right now, the shift between these two modes is mirrored in every human artefact (ix).
Bibliography
McLuhan,M. P.R.Powers(1989)The Global Village: transformation in world, life and mediaNew York: Oxford University Press
Camilla Hestdal 08:59, 29 Oct 2004 (EST)
