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- Today, electronics and automation make mandatory that everybody adjust to the vast global environment as if it were his little home town.[1]
In McLuhan's view, computers and electronics are destined to enable man to treat the entire globe almost as a work of art. Writing of the computer, for example, he States:
- Its true function is to program and orchestrate terrestrial and gaiactic environments and energies in a harmonious way.[2]
He adds:
- In merely terrestrial terms, programming the environment means, first of all, a kind of console for global thermostats to pattern all sensory life in a way conducive to comfort and happiness. Till now, only the artist has been permitted the opportunity to do this in the most puny fashion.[3]
Again, there is a 'return' to the pre-literate conception of art
- From the beginnings of literacy until now, art has mostly been thought of as representation, a kind of matching of inner and outer environments. Primitive man and post-literate man agree that art is making and that it affects the universe.[4]
This new art-form operates on a vast scale:
- Technological art takes the whole earth and its population as its material, not as its form.[5]
And so a completely new role opens up for the artist:
- The Ivory Tower becomes the Control Tower of Human Navigation.[6]
- ↑ War and Peace etc., p 11. In a reference, presumably, to the anti-war youth-movements of the 1960's, McLuhan says: "All our teenagers are now tribal. That is, they recognize their total involvement in the human family regardless of their personal goals or backgrounds"—Counter-Blast, p 143.
- ↑ War and Peace etc., p 89.
- ↑ Ibid p 90.
- ↑ Ibid p 92.
- ↑ Counter-Blast, p 53.
- ↑ Counter-Blast, last words in book, p 144.
