From John Leo’s interview on Booknotes.
“McLuhan was really right about a lot of things … basically he said that any new medium, any one of the many new media that come along, will totally disrupt the society and produce a new personality type, and we're seeing it now and we saw it with print. Basically, if you apply McLuhan's analysis to the electronic media, you're saying that everything that print produces is now on the way out. In McLuhan terms, print produces privacy, a linear approach to things, a logical, orderly approach to things and sequence. The electronic media breaks all that down. There is no left to right; there is no sequence. In the electronic media everything's all at once, and if it isn't all at once, it's -- there's no sense to the sequence. You see a killing in Vietnam, you see an ad, you see a puppy story in the news -- it's just a jumble of things happening. McLuhan predicted that each new media would change the world, and I think he's right.
McLuhan forces us to think how important the media are to the culture and what they do to the culture. People are always up in arms about the content of the media -- too much violence or too much nudity. But McLuhan said, it isn't the content that will do you in; it's the form of each medium itself. ‘The medium is the message’ was his cliche, aphorism. What he meant by that is, don't worry about the content. The content is always the old medium. When the movies came along they thought they were stage plays, and they kept presenting movies as stage presentations. They didn't know that the form demands action; it breaks the proscenium arch; it's a whole different approach. Anyhow, McLuhan understood that when the electronic media came, that it would produce what he called the "global village," that just as CNN, C-SPAN are binding us together, all around the country, all around the world, we no longer have the privacy of individual print cultures. We're going to have a universal language; it will be electronic language.”
