Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

by Marshall McLuhan

It seems obvious enough that technical means of speedup should wipe out the independence of villages and city-states. Whenever speedup has occurred, the new centralist power always takes action to homogenize as many marginal areas as possible. The process that Rome effected by the phonetic alphabet geared to its paper routes has been occurring in Russia for the last century. Again, from the current example of Africa we can observe how very much visual processing of the human psyche by alphabetic means will be needed before any appreciable degree of homogenized social organization is possible. Much of this visual processing was done in the ancient world by nonliterate technologies, as in Assyria. The phonetic alphabet has no rival, however, as a translator of man out of the closed tribal echo-chamber into the neutral visual world of lineal organization. The situation of Africa today is complicated by the new electronic technology. Western man is himself being de-Westernized by his own new speedup, as much as the Africans are being detribalized by our old print and industrial technology.