McLuhan on the 1980s

The 1980s, McLuhan predicted, will see a host of new figures (keeping in mind that he died in 1980): [1]

• A society of contented non-achievers
• The end of Chinese culture [2]
• The end of identity
• The emergence of a new multi-sub-cultural mosaic
• Literacy for an elite only
• Education in an age of amnesia
• Cubism in sports [3]
• The imminent arrival of the computer for home shopping and voting
  
• The collapse of representative government [4]

[1]It is appropriate to start with “figures” insofar as McLuhan and Powers indicate that: “When the ground moves too fast, a condition endemic to the electronic society, only figure is left,” (The Global Village, 99).

[2] In the article McLuhan meditates on the effects of the Chinese bid to apply the phonetic alphabet to their culture. He concludes that it dooms them to an ever greater explosion, via industrial aggression and enterprise, than anything the Western world has ever experienced. What has taken centuries in the West, McLuhan notes, under electric conditions, could happen in China in a generation. McLuhan, “Living at the Speed of Light – the 80’s, version V,” MS., 3.

[3] Ibid., 1.

[4] With the disappearance of private identity, representative government (previously based on majority rule and nose counting) will yield to the figures McLuhan referred to as the “polstergeist,” the cultural mind readers. Ibid., 10.

It is relevant to note here that during the late 1960s McLuhan used the same procedure to “predict” the situation of the 1970s. His vision included: (a) a rampage of lawsuits for disservice environments created by old services, (b) the biggest depression ever, (c) with the birth of the computer, the end of childhood and sex as a special interest, (d) role-playing instead of work, (e) the end of the megalopolis on account of the disservices it creates, (f) the end of the east/west dichotomy, (g) the full emergence of the global theatre, and (h) the end of the bureaucratic structure of the Roman Church as “Electric technology ensures universal liturgical lay participation and dissipation of centralist clerical bureaucracy,” (McLuhan, “The End of Jobs, The Return of Roles,” Administrative Management 13, no. 1 (1970): 40).