Information Implosion and Explosion: "The Medium Is the Message" (Marshall McLuhan)
“That Hitler came into political existence at all is directly owing to radio and public-address systems. This is not to say that these media relayed his thoughts effectively to the German people. His thoughts were of very little consequence. Radio provided the first massive experience of electronic implosion, that reversal of the entire direction and meaning of literate Western civilization. For tribal peoples, for those whose entire social existence is an extension of family life, radio will continue to be a violent experience. Highly literate societies, that have long subordinated family life to individualist stress in business and politics, have managed to absorb and to neutralize the radio implosion without revolution. Not so those communities that have had only brief or superficial experience of literacy. For them, radio is utterly explosive. [. . .] With TV came the end of bloc voting in politics, a form of specialism and fragmentation that won’t work since TV. Instead of the vot...
