I had to return the library book The Global Village by Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers, published in 1989. I would like to have reread it and write a more extensive review of it, but there are so many more books on my reading list.
In general I found it rather obtuse but it has some interesting observations and predictions on and off the mark. Their main thesis was that the tetrad would provide a reasoning tool to better understand developing trends. The opposing corners of the tetrad are enhance-obsolete and retrieve-reverse. Is this a two-dimensional dialectic, an either-or at another level?
p. 48 Music is right-brained and left-brained. We learn notes and then understand harmonic structure.
p. 60 "Propganda cannot succeed where people have no trace of Western culture."
- Jacques Ellul, Propaganda
McLuhan and Powers claim that literacy is required to be susceptible to propaganda. However, many illiterate people subscribed to the teachings of churches.
p. 84 Linking of military adventures to immigration. Immigration "will splinter the white Anglo-Saxon cast of U.S. government, education, and business structures and create a salad-like mélange of ethnic minorities without any single one being predominant."
"[M]ost native-born Americans will be unprepared for the new consumer economy which will emerge, offering service-related jobs not always suited to their intelligence or training. Ethnic diversity will help ignite a full-blown economy based on information exchange."
And much more.
