Marshall McLuhan - Prophet of the Electronic Age

“Prophet of the Electronic Age”
For Marshall McLuhan the highest state of grace imaginable is “Total Awareness.” He pursued this grail with such agile dedication that he managed to give his name to an age and its manners -- McLuhanism. McLuhan himself, by style and preference, was essentially a scholar of orthodox intellectual traditions who used art and literature as the source of his electronic prophecies, his charged probes, his pursuit of Awareness. His famous tagline, THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE, reverberates into a vision which one critic says, “... bears the promise of an disassociated electronic culture,” in other words, his famous global village of the electronic age.
The fact that McLuhan has no “storyline” -- for him “storylines” are dead. Here he is mainly concerned with aspects of space - all kinds of space - the dynamics of space - the new views of space - the old views of space - acoustical space - electronic space - botanical space - interstellar space - the changing view of space. In the film he probes the meaning of “space” - outer space, inner psychological space, visual and pictorial space, as well as abstract space.
He says, “When you put a satellite around the planet it ceases to be the human environment. It drops out as a planet. It becomes an art form.”
(28 Mins)