Why McLuhan Matters III: Digital Tribalism in the Global Village
McLuhan saw tribalism emerging in the TV era. Social media completed the process.
McLUhan in 1967: “The Global Village is a world in which you don’t necessarily have harmony... everybody is maliciously engaged and poking his nose in everybody else’s business.” An excerpt from an essay in the new Canadian journal “2067”; read the full essay here.
…The electronic reach of our nerves and neurons now spans the globe, and it doesn’t just connect us: it synchronizes vast numbers of people at once. Never before have so many people been simultaneously absorbed in issues that have nothing to do with their daily lives. This unnatural involvement with distant events draws us into shared concerns, creating a sense of community more typical of a small village, but now on a global scale. That’s how McLuhan arrived at his ideas of the Global Village and “retribalization.”
But television only made people watch the same news together. Social media took it much further by exposing people not just to the same news but directly to one another. That is real village life on a global scale: everyone watching, judging, and reacting to everyone else in real time. McLuhan’s “Global Village,” which was only a metaphor in the TV era, has come to life in social media feeds. Read how McLuhan described life in the Global Village in the 1967 film This is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Massage. It sounds a lot like social media (starting at 17:00):
The Global Village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as a little town where everybody is maliciously engaged and poking his nose in everybody else’s business. The Global Village is a world in which you don’t necessarily have harmony — you have extreme concerns with everybody else’s business and are much involved in everybody else’s life... It doesn’t necessarily mean harmony, peace and quiet, but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else’s affairs.
In a 1977 interview on TVO, McLuhan dismisses romantic expectations about the Global Village expressed by his interlocutor, host Mike McManus (starting at 1:22):
McManus: But it seems, Dr. McLuhan, that this tribal world is not friendly.
McLuhan: Oh, no, tribal people… one of their main kinds of sport is a sort of butchering each other. It’s a full-time sport in tribal societies... The closer you get together the more you like each other? No, there is no evidence of that in any situation we’ve heard of. When people get close together, they get more and more savagely impassionate with each other.
Electronic media removed space and time between people, exposing them to distant events simultaneously. But digital media are now exposing people to each other, removing not only physical but also social distance, making everyone just one click away from anyone else, regardless of geographical distance or social status. This hyperconnectivity creates a lot of disturbance. McLuhan drew attention to this problem sixty years ago.
This is an excerpt from an essay in a new Canadian journal, “2067,” on applied McLuhan in the AI era, covering:
II. The Global Extension of the Central Nervous System and AI
IV. Digital Overload, Numbness, and Amputation (and AI!)
V. Surviving the Digital Maelstrom
See other books by Andrey Mir:
NEW! The Technological Imperative: Why We Develop Our Media. Essays on Human Agency and AI (2026)
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
