The Global Village

This is Marshall McLuhan's last book, written in collaboration with his longtime friend, Bruce Powers. It updates McLuhan's landmark study, Understanding Media, which was published 25 years ago.^l^l The premise is the distinction between what McLuhan and Powers call Visual Space - or the left-brain, linear, quantitative reasoning tradition of the West beginning with Plato and Aristotle - as against what they call Acoustic Space - right-brain, qualitative, pattern-producing reasoning, the holistic approach of the East. They argue that with the advent of the "global village" - as a result of electronic communications - these two mind sets are "slamming into each other at the speed of light". In their words, "In the last half of the 20th century the East will rush westward and the West will embrace orientalism, all in a desperate attempt to cope with each other, to avoid violence. But the key to peace is to understand both these systems simultaneously".