War and Peace in the Global Village

by Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore

Initiallly published in 1968, this text is regarded as a revolutionary work for its depiction of a planet made ever smaller by new technologies. A mosaic of pointed insights and probes, this text predicts a world without centres or boundaries. It illustrates how the electronic information travelling around the globe at the speed of light has eroded the rules of the linnear, literate world. No longer can there be fixed positions or goals.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Sociology, Politics, Technology, History, War

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Herbert Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his teaching career as a professor of English at several universities in the United States and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life. He is known as the "father of media studies".
McLuhan coined the expression "the medium is the message" in the first chapter in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and the term global village. He predicted the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented. He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, though his influence began to wane in the early 1970s. In the years following his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles. However, with the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web, interest was renewed in his work and perspectives.

Reviews

[Andrew Neuendorf · Rating 4 out of 5]

You had me at "the computer is the LSD of the business world," Marshall, you had me at "the computer is the LSD of the business world."

[Macoco G.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Segundo libro se MacLuhan tras Galaxia Gutemberg. Mucho más sencillo de leer, planteado como una especie de cómic con imágenes y texto. Carece de la profundidad y clarividencia del primero. Muy interesante el concepto de "aldea global", pero tras esto, se queda un poco corto.

[Kitap · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting thoughts:

There is a rather tenuous division between war as education and education as war.... There is no question here of values. It is simple information technology being used by one community to reshape another one. It is this type of aggression that we exert on our own youngsters in what we call "education." We simply impose upon them the patterns that we find convenient to ourselves and consistent with the available technologies. Such customs and usages, of course, are always past-oriented and the new technologies are necessarily excluded from the educational establishment until the elders have relinquished power. (149)

In the present age this problem of not simply being human but of having to program the entire process has become a crux because of our electronic technology. The new potential is so great that no training for any individual or any society could faintly tap its possibilities. Life is not given to us ready-made but has become a task of making rather than of matching. There is no previous model, private or corporate, that can serve for the present time. That is why the anti-environment has become so indispensable a crux. We have simply got to create anti-environments in order to know what we are and what were are doing. (177)

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a classic book by Marshall McLuhan, famous for "the medium is the massage." It discusses how societies, when new technologies are invented and utilized, tend to have wars to create a balance in society. Dividing the book into four parts, I found the first and third parts to be excellent, and the second and fourth parts hard to understand. The book helped me to understand, for the first time ever, why wars are inevitable: they are not actually caused by religion & territory needs, but by imbalances due to new technologies.

[Annie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like The Medium is the Massage, this acts almost as a companion to the more comprehensive Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (or, potentially from McLuhan's perspective, it is a companion to the former two). I think it, unfortunately, embodies and highlights a lot of the worst aspects of his thinking, particularly around the "primitive man" and "the" East. It shows it's age. That said, it was interesting that he framed this book more so around war and education (war as education, education as war) and environments created by media and technologies. Even better is the constant quoting of Finnegans Wake throughout the margins.

[Dmitry · Rating 1 out of 5]

(The English review is placed beneath the Russian one)

Это тот тип книг, которые люди упоминают, чтобы показать, какие они умные и интеллектуальные личности. Такие книги, "написанные не для всех", призваны возвысить читателя над остальными людьми, показать, что они не такие как все, что они не просто другие, а качественно другие (читай, лучше).

В принципе, именно такие книги всегда ассоциировались у меня со словом Философия. Т.е. когда в книге непонятно всё или практически всё. Вот именно то же самое у меня с этой книгой. Я смог прочитать только половину этой и так маленькой книги, но даже эта половина мало что смогла сказать мне о сути книги. Что я понял? Да ничего. Совсем. Для меня, это абсолютно несвязанный текст либо очень пьяного человека, либо страдающего каким-либо психологическим заболеванием. Текст книги не имеет под собой никакой логики, ибо это просто набор предложений, которые как будто взяли из разных других книг и поместили в случайном порядке в эту. Да, найдутся читатели, которые скажут, что я просто не смог постичь великий смысл этих писателей и, мол, они специально решили доносить свои Великие Идеи, таким образом, т.е. чтобы только достигшим определённого уровня просветления он мог быть понятен и так далее и так далее. Честно сказать, мне всё равно. У меня достаточно непрочитанных книг чтобы позволить себе не обращать внимания ни на эту книгу, ни на её поклонников. Поэтому я повторяю ещё раз: эта самая пустая и бессмысленная книга из той 1,000, что я прочитал до сих пор. В ней нет ровным счётом ничего, а те, кто говорят, что в ней есть смысл, просто выдумывают его сами. Да-да, книга написана так, что каждый читатель может объяснять содержание книги по-своему. Тут нет смысла, а значит, читатель волен сам создавать смыслы, т.е. содержание. Разумеется, так не была задумана книга. И честно сказать, я не понимаю, почему автор выбрал такой странный подход к написанию книги. Возможно, это игра автора с читателем, а возможно, это блажь автора, в смысле, понимайте меня как хотите. Что ж, возможно это имело смысл в XX веке, когда книг издавалось меньше чем сейчас, и мир ещё не был такой «глобальной деревней», каким он стал после изобретения Интернета и самолётов. Возможно тогда, такие ребусы были популярны. Сейчас же, это раритет для псевдоинтеллектуалов, которые хотят казаться не теми, кто они есть на самом деле. Я больше ценю простоту и ясность текста в жанре нехудожественной литературе. Написать абракадабру с тем, чтобы сбить с толку читателя, тактика не очень примечательная.

These are the type of books that people mention to show how smart and intelligent they are. Such books, "written not for everyone", are meant to elevate the reader above the rest of the people, to show that they are not like everyone else, that they are not just different, but qualitatively different (better).

In principle, this is the kind of book I have always associated with the word "Philosophy". That is when everything or almost everything in a book is incomprehensible. That's exactly what I had with this book. I could only read half of this small book, but even this half couldn't tell me much about the essence of the book. What did I understand? Nothing. Nothing at all. To me, it is a completely unconnected text of either a very drunk person or suffering from some psychological illness. The text of the book has no logic whatsoever because it is simply a collection of sentences that seem to have been taken from various other books and placed in random order in this one.
Yes, there will be readers who will say that I simply could not comprehend the great meaning of these writers and that they purposely decided to communicate their Great Ideas in such a way that only those who had reached a certain level of enlightenment could understand them, and so on and so forth. Honestly, I don't care. I have enough unread books to afford to pay no attention to this book or its fans. So I'll say it again: this is the most empty and meaningless book of the 1,000 I've read so far. There is absolutely nothing in it, and those who say it makes sense are just making it up themselves. Yes, yes, the book is written in such a way that each reader can explain the contents of the book in his or her own way. There is no meaning, which means that the reader is free to create his own meanings, i.e., content. Of course, that is not how the book was intended. And honestly, I don't understand why the author chose such a strange approach to writing the book. Perhaps it's the author's game with the reader, or perhaps, it's the author's whim, in the sense that, understand me as you like. Well, maybe it made sense in the 20th century when fewer books were published than now, and the world was not yet the "global village" it has become since the invention of the Internet and airplanes. Perhaps then, such puzzles were popular. Now they are a rarity for pseudo-intellectuals who want to appear different from who they really are. I appreciate the simplicity and clarity of text more in the nonfiction genre. Writing gibberish in order to confuse the reader is not a very remarkable tactic.

[Feamelwen · Rating 2 out of 5]

What the hell was that all about?

Some thoughts were pretty interesting, but it's written in an incomprehensible collage and free-association style which perhaps strives to imitate Joyce's writing, admired by the authors.

In any case, the central thesis could be explained in a few sentences, but the authors throw themselves into dubious metaphors, countless examples and "revolutionary" insights which sometimes sound like some random philosophy student's drunk ramblings.

Any new technology is a wound in our minds. All sorts of social changes and reactions can be interpreted as a reaction to that wound. There. Now let me tell that same thing with a hundred examples and in many different ways.

[Theryn Fleming · Rating 3 out of 5]

The design of this book seems to be as important as the content. It features quotes from Finnegan's Wake in the margins and many images throughout, as well as varied typefaces and font sizes, landscape-oriented text, white text on black, etc. for emphasis. So it's definitely a book-as-object, not just agnostic "content" transferable to any medium. That said, the book feels very blog-like, perhaps because bloggers often make use of similar design elements. (WaPitGV is still meant to be read front-to-back, though.) It does make you wonder about both McLuhan's prescience and the extent to which blogs are mimicking books.

[Tony Poerio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book for anyone interested in technology, from a humanistic standpoint. McLuhan is perhaps the most aphoristic modern writer I've ever read, and the book is filled with lines like: "the computer is the LSD of the business world", and "the consequences of images are images of consequences". His style is playful, bombastic, sometimes apocalyptic, but always very literary. One of the books that got the young me, then a hopelessly philosophical liberal arts major, interested in computing.

[Rand · Rating 3 out of 5]

there are some cool pictures in here and lots of finnegans wake quotes. a fun little prescient time capsule

[Mckenzie Ragan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even on a good day, Marshall McLuhan overwhelms. The man’s an intellectual giant with keen foresight and spot-on insight into broader implications. His interest in evolving technologies, coupled with dynamite design from Quentin Fiore, comes out in a playful approach to his subjects that demonstrates his ideas on the page (one particular medium) even as he’s explaining (a variety of mediums) in the text.

Like his other works, War and Peace in the Global Village overwhelms. And as with his other collaborations with Fiore, this serves as another illustrative layer. A lot of stuff is explored in this book. A lot of references are made in this book. But by and large, the main focus remains (1) the global village, and (2) war within the global village. Everything else, directly or indirectly stems from these concerns. And as with all of his books, McLuhan’s approaches these subjects through the lens of technology and media.

His treatment of the global village is in terms of how technology has contributed to its birth, how technology may continue fostering its growth, and the wider implications of technology in a hyperconnected world. Within the global village, technology augments the individual. McLuhan proposes that a technology or media is never grasped until it is supplanted; and when this happens the individual and society are catapulted into existential crisis. It’s not just a matter of adapting to a new media. There is also a very real suffering that corresponds to the loss of the old - the pain of a phantom limb. This suffering ushers in war. From here, the reader is plunged into war past, present, and future. Special emphasis is given to the relationship between war and education. Education prepares society for war - war serves as education.

No surprise that this little volume overwhelms: the world has become fragmented, saturated in images, ads, information, statistics, etc. A then B then C chronology is irrelevant in our society at this point, and McLuhan’s text mirrors society. Quentin Fiore exacerbates the feeling of anxiety with illustrations, photographs, and advertisements. Typography, page orientation, font, and formatting also contribute. The most unnerving aspect to the design of the book is marginal excerpts from Finnegan’s Wake on each page, as well as a listing of Joyce’s 10 Thunders early on. With this comes both a tension in Joyce’s opaque, at-a-glance nonsense and an overall feeling of enigmatic apocalypse/apocalyptic enigma - the end and its secrets folded into each other accordion style.

This was written in 1968. It’s always jarring how close McLuhan’s predictions come to reality. Every time I read him I go back and forth between gawking at his oracular vision and mentally grieving that he’s not around to provide commentary in the social media era.

[Tvrtko Balić · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is very subpar for McLuhan and it isn't to my liking. It presents some general ideas by McLuhan, but they are better developed and better presented in his other works. It has a lot of illustrations and experiments with the font and the general presentation of text as well as the presentation of information in general, but to a small degree, this is done so much better in The Medium is the Massage. McLuhan fanboys way too hard for Joyce making the book hard to really dive into. The theories which I generally think are brilliant are stretched way above their capacity so that when McLuhan explains absolutely all historical development, neglecting other factors, I can't help but think the whole thing is bullshit. Still... all those flaws are more like a collection of small flaws than as a bad whole. I still like McLuhan too much to rate it with mere three stars, the ideas presented are not that different from his other works, they are just terribly presented, but even then I'm not sure how much of this impression of mine is objective, how much is comparisson with his other works and how much is due to personal taste.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like the Marshal McLuhan books with pictures…I like pictures…I love lamp.

Gutenberg galaxy and extensions are genius and well researched on another level. But books like this are also so necessary. Because not everyone has an above ADHD level memory ability. Since we live in a new technological society and everything these nights, is not the optimal focus.

How else are we going to take him seriously when he puts technology before economics and politics. Give me hockey players shaking hands. Give me Napoleon’s history. I want to know how much the stirrup changed the course of history and I’m not even foolin. How else are we going to get it through our fragile thought skulls that technology is the primary mover of history?

I like when he writes more freely with the weird jargon in the margins. Like wtf are you talking about right now with all these phonetic revolutions? I’m not even ready for this magazine. So thank you Marshal McLuhan for again being the only one tracking social history better than the others. One day someone might listen with their ear holes.

[Simon · Rating 2 out of 5]

some interesting pull quotes (and loved the finnegans wake) but man. there could be no worse proselytist for an integral, post-literature world than this. terrible organization. prose too precise to do any poetic gesturing but not actually precise enough to ever make it clear exactly what was meant by the either very vague or very stupid conception at its center. shame because i thought the sensory approach was interesting.

[Ailín Ó Dálaigh · Rating 2 out of 5]

Intellectually provocative and probing, but not rigorous whatsoever. Many, if not all, of McLuhan’s theoretical insights on technology’s role in society (read: war - they almost become synonymous) break down easily under interrogation, but that’s why most probably consume this text in the form of secondary literature.

Still worth a read!

[PERMADREAM. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Served as a probe.

At times I feel like I am closer to understanding McLuhan, and at other times this is not the case.

I think I understood about 10% of what he was trying to say in this book. But damn that 10% was interesting.

[John Keillor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Arty philosophy with photography

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brilliant ideas, though some remain half-understood by me.

[KKDDBB · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somewhat vague to me but maybe this is because of the distance in time and the fact that english is not my first language. A lot of interesting thoughts though.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

VARIOUS OBSERVATIONS ON ‘NEW MEDIA’ AND OTHER TOPICS

Authors Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore wrote in this 1968 book, “The pain caused by new media and new technologies tends very much to fall into the category of ‘referred pain,’ such as skin trouble caused by the appendix or the heart. As with all new technologies, pain creates a special form of space, just as they also create pain… All new technologies bring on the cultural blues, just as the old ones evoked phantom pain after they have disappeared.” (Pg. 16)

They observe, “The new information technology will shortly encompass the entire astral system, harnessing its resources for terrestrial use. The important thing is to realize that electric information systems are live environments in the full organic sense. They alter our feelings and sensibilities, especially when they are not attended to.” (Pg. 36)

They note, “Various people have pointed out that the computer revolution is greater than that of the wheel in its power to reshape human outlook and human organization. Whereas the wheel is an extension of the foot, the computer gives us a world where the hand of man never set foot… As much as the wheel is an extension of the foot, the computer is an extension of our nervous system, which exists by virtue of feedback or circuitry.” (Pg. 53)

They point out, “A growing number of America’s elite are quietly turning on. It is not uncommon for people on these trips, especially with new chemical drugs, as opposed to organic ones, to develop the illusion that they are themselves computers. Similarly, when once psychotic children identified themselves as bunnies and cats and other beasts from the fun animal world, now they identify with cars and television sets. This, of course, is not so much a hallucination as a discovery. The computer is a more sophisticated extension of the central nervous system than ordinary electric relays and circuits. When people live in an environment of such circuitry and feedback, carrying much greater quantities of information than any previous social scene, then develop something akin to what medicine men call ‘referred pain.’ The impulse to get ‘turned on’ is a simple Pavlovian reflex felt by human beings in an environment of electric information. Such an environment is itself a phenomenon of self-amputation.” (Pg. 73)

They assert, “As a fort of capsule observation, it could be said that the computer is the LSD of the business world, transforming its outlook and objectives. None of the existing goals of twentieth-century business enterprise can survive the impact of the computer for even ten years. The drop-out is not a phenomenon limited to the high school or the campus, for the high the executive the more he feels cut off from the real developments of the operation he directs.” (Pg. 83)

They argue, “The Second World War was a radio war as much as it was an industrial war. The radio phase of electronics had awakened the tribal energies and visions of the European peoples in a way that television is now doing to America… The radio slump or depression of 1929-1939 was the result of switching the vision of a whole population from visually conceived objectives to the total field of polarized energies that automatically goes with radio and auditory space. The United States is by far the most visually organized country in the history of the world. It is the only country that was ever founded on the basis of phonetic literacy for all… We are not in the midst of our first television war… That the war is being fought in the American home as much as in Vietnam can be illustrated by noting some of the favorite music, painting, and literature of the young teen-agers, for nearly all of whom this war and all wars are anathema.” (Pg. 132-135)

They state, “Games stand in relation to new technology somewhat in the form of clothing. Radio and baseball were well matched, but television has killed baseball and advanced football and ice hockey. Baseball was quite incompatible with the television spectator’s role of participation in tactile depth… It has been the altered sensibilities of the whole culture in the bodily contact direction that have revived soccer. The new games of surfboarding, water skiing, and snow skiing are fascinating examples of a new taste for dynamic contour exploration in which the participant amidst the most exciting environment is almost entirely visceral rather than visual in his involvement. It can be safely predicted that color television will drive people much further in this direction…” (Pg. 171)

This book will interest those studying McLuhan, and contemporary media.

[mono]

α(⋙) - a curious amalgamation of esoteric ideas. Deceptively short as it requires grokking works such as Finnegan's Wake.

I could've sworn more research has been done into the opening thesis: that technology molds brain development allowing tools to be experiences as extension of the body. I'll have to look around 📜google scholar.

αₜ - Reading 📘Naam's More Than Human reminded me that it was Dr. Miguel Nicolelis' research on controlling limbs with brain implants - more recently driving wheelchairs - in Nicolelis' words - "Such findings tell us that the brain is so amazingly adaptable that it can incorporate an external device … as a natural extension of the body. "

So many rabbit holes, so little time...

[Josh Pendergrass]

I have been obsessed with Marshall McLuhan for a number of years now, I think he is one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. His ideas are somewhat slippery and metaphorical; he uses language and concepts that aren't always easy to pinpoint and don't fit into a specifically rationalist/materialist understanding of the world; and I believe this might be the reason that his work is now often thought of as a relic of the 1960s. Our current zeitgeist is deeply uncomfortable with anything that can't be measured, quantified, and categorized.

All of that said, his ideas give us a blueprint for the world we live in and where we are going. It is not so much politics, or economics, or even religion that are the main drivers of human affairs, it is technology. Our technologies (particularly our media and communication technologies) shape our environment and the response of our central nervous system and our subconscious to that environment. We are like fish in water, unaware of technological mediums shaping our reality. In War and Peace in the Global Village McLuhan expands upon his study of how electronic media and technology alter our environment and our perception of the world and each other, and how we as individuals and as a species respond to these changes. He argues that because we are unaware of and not adapted to the changes brought about by our new electronic environment, we unconsciously revert to tribal, instinctual, and even violent behavior. The electronic environment threatens our identity on such a core level that we lose our sense of who we are and what our place is.

McLuhan's ideas are more important than ever in an culture where the majority of our interactions are mediated by our screens.

[Don · Rating 4 out of 5]

The funny thing about Marshall McLuhan is that whenever you read one of his chapters, you're never really sure just what he said - though he described it in a way that seems enlightened, meaningful and cogent to our times. I find myself falling back, re-reading the chapter again always feeling a bit off kilter.

That said, War and Peace In the Global Village does one thing well - it makes you think - and think at a higher level about our culture, its future and its propensity for change.

Cultural change causes identity crises at a level that pits the old vs. the new; agricultural vs. industrial, industrial vs. informational that eventually ends in war. Are nations really fighting each other, or, are we fighting the end of one societal view vs. another?

Given this hypothesis, McLuhan leads the reader down the chilling path of what our information society will hold in the future? The fact that he wrote this in 1968 is more prophetic now that we're entering the internet age. What conflicts will arise? How will the global economy change our perception of nations? War? Education?

A tough read - but, something that will make you ponder the future.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This little book, originally published in 1968, will be in my constant reading rotation. This publication has countless juxtapositions of James Joyce quotes and vintage ads and pictures within the margins that alone serve as a message within a message.

I found this quoteon the publisher's website: "Interviewed by Playboy magazine a year after the book's release, McLuhan called our era a 'transitional era of profound pain and tragic identity quest.' 'But,' he added, 'the agony of our age is the labor pain of rebirth.'"

This book has really sparked some underlying synapses, and I have also found this book is fun to read as you read Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.

Great little rubber!

[Erika RS]

I picked this book up, along with Understanding Media (also by McLuhan) at a random book sale. I loved Understanding Media so I thought I would enjoy this one too. Instead, I barely understood it and thought it was wrong when I did understand it. I never really figured out what the authors' point was. There were interesting fragments of ideas, but there was something of a fundamental disconect between my understanding and what was on the page. That said, the book really has a great rhythm to it. I almost feel like I would have understood it better if I had listened to it. Perhaps that was the point.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm still puzzling over this book, but after three or four times threw it, and considerable readings of the secondary scholarship, I am finally starting to make sense of it. I think it might have been McLuhan's attempt at his great attempt at a synthesizing work in the artistic mode, as he tries to write with Finnegans Wake, rather than about it. My reading notes can be found here: http://virtualpeacegarden.com/?q=node/4

[Kevin Kizer · Rating 4 out of 5]

McLuhan, who coined the phrase "global village", really understood how technology can allow tribal cultures to catch up with modern societies without having the growing pains of an industrial revolution, etc. He referred directly to Russia and China, but the same is true in the middle east today.

Also, he predicted that color TV (the book was written in '68) would make fast-moving, more visceral sports like skiing and soccer more popular in the US.

[Thadd · Rating 3 out of 5]

A brief analysis of Finnegan's Wake, Joyce's book about the impact of moveable type and other inventions, ones that altered different societies. According to McLuhan, Joyce was one of the greatest authors who ever lived. Using photos and quotes from Finnegan's Wake, McLuhan urges the reader to think about the impact of inventions, how they have made the world a global village. Amazing as it may seem, this book was written before the internet was invented.

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

Rated: F

[Harris Bin Munawar · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The consequences of images are images of consequences"