Nick Carr writes in today’s Guardian that Marshall McLuhan’s message is back. He’s probably right. But he then goes on to raise a couple of interesting points after dividing the world of content into temperate classifications.

Reading, to put it simply, is a lonely pursuit, while speech is a
social one. So when we became readers, rather than listeners, we
sacrificed our shared, tribal consciousness and became locked into
private consciousness.

Electric media, being cool technologies that promote interaction, would
bring back our lost tribal consciousness, McLuhan believed. But our
tribes would no longer be small, isolated groups. Because the new media
spanned the planet, we would become members of a “global village”.

Point taken. But are we really creating a new consciousness, and if we are, does that translate into community. For that’s what a village is. Can we create a truly complex and involved village through electronic communication alone. Where the structures are so well defined.

Every village needs rules, laws and constitutions as well as a means to enact them. Are we building these up with search engines, blogs and social networks? Are these internet constructs flexible enough to allow us to redevelop McLuhan’s lost tribal consciousness?