In addition to presenting an image of the planet “shrinking,” becoming a “single household” (a condition of “no boundaries and no monopolies of knowledge”),[1] McLuhan tries to show how change itself has become the main staple and “…change alone has any semblance of reality.”[2] One of the best images McLuhan offers as a means of apprehending the character of the new situation can be seen in “A Media Approach to Inflation”:
Perhaps there is no better way of indicating the discontinuous simultaneous pattern of the new situation in economics and society than to point to the nature of the TV image, which is structured by innumerable pulsations which move toward the viewer through the monitor. The TV image is literally constituted by a mesh or mosaic of live intervals which provide an overwhelming inducement to involvement on the part of the TV audience. The entire world of electric information now presents pulsating intervals for the intervention and involvement of the world population.[3]
Naturally, under these conditions, old categories and figures tend to blur and disappear. New figures spring up only to submerge again in a blur, and formerly identifiable categories, e.g. artist, frontiersman, and enemy, push towards invisibility:[4]
Today the end of steel is no mere metaphor, since the ‘hardware’ now disappears inside the computer by design; but the new frontier is as invisible as a radio wave. There are no tracks to identify or locate the new frontiersman, even nostalgically. He has neither retrospect nor prospect in his instant space-time field. It is all pasts and all futures in an eternal present.[5]
Older media “forms” too, that were formerly invisible environments, become visible as figures and are caught up in this shrinking, blurring, and pulsing action. Under the proscenium arch of the satellite, older forms are shown as enacting something of a drama of pseudo-Ovidian metamorphosis.[6] Again, it is a theme mentioned, albeit briefly, in Understanding Media.[7] It is, however, most visible in his proposed musical-cum-neo-beast epic, “Every Man in His Media or Medium,” where a multiplicity of old forms take the place of the obsolesced East-West dichotomy.
This shrinking, blurring, and pulsing action, McLuhan shows, also serves to inform the very “tone” of the decade. From the 1970s he documents how the age of boredom, which had earlier supplanted the age of anxiety, was in turn giving way to an age of rapid oscillation or phase shifting (pulsating intervals) between ecstasy (and the thrills of widespread festive celebration),[8] and paranoia (or a state of “…panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed coexistence”).[9] McLuhan saw that paranoia was evoked when: (a) there is a pervasive feeling that every kind of change affects everything else,[10] (b) there is a general awareness that the technological game is out of control,[11] and (c) “war” becomes the “environment” of our time.[12]
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