Marilyn's Photos - Sep 28 2026 - The Most Famous Thing in the World
We live in a time where we know our world. The whole world. What's the most famous thing? Supposedly it is the Eiffel Tower. Or it could be Mount Everest, or The Mona Lisa, or even a can of Coca-Cola.
Marshall McLuhan called it the "global village" - that electronic media shrinks the world into an interconnected community. We share information instantly. He was pessimistic about it - it would lead to increasing war and other forms of conflict. There were risks of mass terror and sudden panic.
His expression was "tribal man". I think of "tribal man" as a worrisome thing - not someone we want to be in the new electronic media. I liked what we were before this age - in the age of the book - the "literary man".
Here's a CBC image of him from 1965. It is part of a CBC article which has a program clip from Explorations in 1960. It is HERE.
This dead tree is gone now. There's a new house going up where it used to be. Doesn't it have the sense of tribal to it?
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