ABSTRACT
On July 10, 1962 the world’s first com mercial com munications satellite tri
umphantly soared into the skies above Cape Canaveral, thereby opening the
door to an era of almost instantaneous television transmissions around the
globe. Excitem ent about the new medium grew throughout the decade as
rapidly expanding audiences seemed to promise a shared cultural context
that m ight bring citizens of the world closer together. One of the best known
contributors to this crescendo of popular enthusiasm was literary scholar
Marshall McLuhan, who published The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962, a book that
began his m eteoric rise to popular fame. Referred to by Life magazine as the
“oracle of the electric age,” McLuhan popularized the notion of a “global vil
lage” knit together by televisual com m unication.1 Drawing his inspiration
from fellow Canadian scholar Harold Innis, M cLuhan contended that the
shift from print to electronic media was an important transition in human
history. For too long, according to McLuhan, the printed word had domi
nated Western consciousness, fostering an overly rational, linear, and individ
ualistic mindset. While the pre-Gutenberg era relied on oral discourse that
stimulated affective bonds between com m unicators, the development of the
printing press facilitated the rise of the m odern bureaucracies that could
organize and manipulate entire nations.2 For McLuhan, television promised a
departure from the linear and the rational by feeding the senses a m ultimedia
flood of imagery that increased one’s involvement with the com m unication
process. Moreover, it promised to restore affective bonds by fostering a shared
sense of proximity among people around the world. “Electromagnetic dis
coveries have recreated the simultaneous ‘field’ in all hum an affairs so that
the human family now exists under conditions of a ‘global village,”’ he wrote.
