The result of electric speed-up in industry at large is the creation of intense sensitivity to the interrelation and interprocess of the whole, so as to call for ever-new types of organization and talent. Viewed from the old perspectives of the machine age, this electric network of plants and processes seems brittle and tight. In fact, it is not mechanical, and it does begin to develop the sensitivity and pliability of the human organism. But it also demands the same varied nutriment and nursing as the animal organism.
With the instant and complex interprocesses of the organic form, automated industry also acquires the power of adaptability to multiple uses….
Marshall McLuhan and Ted Carpenter, UNDERSTANDING MEDIA, 1964 (Signet paperback edition), p.308
“Here are 2 quotations from 1968 that develop what MM says above in 1964:”
The important thing is to realize that electric information systems are live environments in the full organic sense.”
Marshall McLuhan [with Quentin Fiore], WAR AND PEACE IN THE GLOBAL VILLAGE: An Inventory of Some of the Current Spastic Situations that Could Be Eliminated by More Feedforward, 1968, p.36“Our whole cultural habitat, which we once viewed as a mere container of people, is being transformed by these media and by space satellites into a living organism, itself contained within a new macrocosm or connubium of a supraterrestrial nature.”
Marshall McLuhan, PLAYBOY, March, 1969, p.70
