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More, in the McLuhan sense, in the Internet, I can see that the Medium is not the Message yet. The ideal social
relationships coming out of the electronic interactions are imperative but not empirical; they are more theoretical
than practical. The experts are simply talking to fellow experts or addressing themselves. So, we know that the
Internet is too serious a matter to be left to the experts alone! So, we know that the best of the Global Village is yet
to come.
Another way of looking at the Internet is that the medium is not one single message but many conflicting messages.
As old as of 24 BC, Babylon meant ‘the gateway of the gods’ (Wikipedia) – as young as of 24 years ago, the
Internet is simply the modern Babble-On, the gateways of many gods with many tongues, some forked. Today
still, in the Internet, there are too many people talking at the same time without trying to see each other’s point of
view. And multitudes are trying to hurt each other by words, short of the sword.
Notwithstanding, because of the Internet, it is much easier for you and me to realize that we are members of a
global tribe called Mankind. In the early 1960s, decades before the Internet came into being, Marshall McLuhan
saw whom he called Tribal Man and called this virtual community Global Village. McLuhan saw that radio and TV
interconnected man to man by sights and sounds, some of these interactively. In a TV broadcast on 18 May 1960
aired by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the interviewer mouthed McLuhan’s thoughts, saying by
way of introduction: ‘Touch a button, the world is yours. You know, they talk about the world getting smaller?’ And
‘Everyone is now our own neighborhood … The world is now a global village ... a global village.’
Reading again McLuhan’s little big book Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man (1964, 13 th ed, New
American Library, 318 pages), I agree with William Stewart (2006, livinginternet.com) that McLuhan effectively
predicted the Internet (the Net), saying: ‘Marshall McLuhan’s insights made the concept of a global village,
interconnected by an electronic system, part of our popular culture well before it actually happened.’ I see the Net
as the global network of networks of computers. With the invention of the World Wide Web (the Web), the Net
exploded in the 1990s. I see the Web as the global network of publications online. And therein lies a great
promise, a hidden power. Primate, let us discover it.
(2) Primate, come make out The Blogal Village.
I see the Internet as a publisher, The Universal Publisher, and I revel in that thought. With McLuhan’s eyes, I can
see that from the Web has arisen the Phoenix of Unpublished Authors in the form of the blog. I see a blog as an
uploaded, instantly & automatically approved, published musing, sometimes amusing. There are millions of blogs
out there in cyberspace, and millions of bloggers. That computer-generated world I now want to call, in honor of
the one and only Marshall McLuhan and the millions of bloggers: The Blogal Village. I love it! I have written a few
hundred blogs myself since 04 October 2002 when I posted my first pair of blogs. Now then, paraphrasing Alfred
Lord Tennyson, I have become a part of all that I have writ. (And passionately, if not magically. Even as a Muggle,
in 30 days, I have written and published in the American Chronicle alone 3 long feature articles on greening the
world: ‘The Yankee Dawdle’ 04 Feb, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ 26 Feb and now 03 March ‘Primate Change.’)
Primate Change? Or Climate Change?