Indeed, diverse cultures were impinging on each other more by the day. In his enormously influential Understanding Media (1964), Marshall McLuhan described the coming world as a “global village," unified by communications technology and rapid dissemination of information. This electrified world, with its instant linkage, would bear no resemblance to the preceding and of the human family, a single consciousness?

At least within our own consciousness, the past is malleable and flexible, constantly changing as our recollection reinterprets and re-explains what has happened.

As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.

A piece of writing must be viewed as a constantly evolving organism.

As we begin to understand , we begin to understand that we’re part of an ever-changing, interlocking, non-linear, kaleidoscopic world.

You now have two distinct ways of gathering information beyond what you yourself can experience. One of them is less a medium than an environment — the Internet — with a huge multiplicity of points of view, lots of different ways to find out what's going on in the world. Lots of people are tuned to that, and a million points of view have bloomed. It creates a cacophony of viewpoints that doesn't have any political coherence at all, a beautiful melee, but it doesn't have the capacity to create large blocs of belief. The other medium, TV, has a much smaller share of viewers than at any time in the past, but those viewers get all their information there. They get turned into a very uniform belief block. TV in America created the most coherent reality distortion field that I’ve ever seen. Therein is the problem: People who vote watch TV, and they are hallucinating like a sonofabitch. Basically, what we have in this country is government by hallucinating mob.

The global village is a reality. We are joined by satellite, supersonic travel, four thousand international meetings each year, tens of thousands of multinational companies, international organizations and newsletters and journals, even an emergent pan-culture of music, movies, art, humor.

Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.

Whatever we know about society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media. This is true not only of our knowledge of society but also of our knowledge of nature.

The media themselves are the avant-garde of our society. Avant-garde no longer exists in painting, music and poetry, it's the media themselves.

Media coverage tends to be episodic and event-driven, always in search of the dramatic and the new.

Past events are not dead but constantly making their claims on the present, modifying it even as they themselves are modified in the maw of subsequent events and in the memory which is part of the shaping of imagination.

Life is a constant adaptation.

This wide, fast-moving system of technology bends the culture subtly, but steadily, so it amplifies the following forces: Becoming, Cognifying, Flowing, Screening, Accessing, Sharing, Filtering, Remixing, Interacting, Tracking, Questioning, and then Beginning.