Electrical technology transforms humanity.

(Published in the print edition of the December 3, 1960, issue of The New Yorker Magazine.)

“Thirty years ago, almost every house along this road was hooked up to a family cow. In summer you would see her in the pasture or staked out in a field; in winter her presence would be known by the conical pile of manure against the barn, its apex under the window of the tieup. Most homeowners planted a garden, raised fruits and vegetables and berries, and put their harvest in jars against the long winter. Almost everyone had a few hens picking up the assorted proteins of yard and field. If you walked into a man’s barn, you found a team of work horses shifting their weight from one foot to another. This pleasing rural picture has been retouched until it is hardly recognizable. The family cow has gone the way of the ivory-billed woodpecker. Householders no longer plant gardens if they can avoid it; instead, they work hard, earn money, and buy a TV set and a freeze. Then, acting on advices from the TV screen, they harvest the long, bright, weedless rows at the chain store, bringing home a carton of tomatoes with eye appeal and a package of instant potatoes. The family flock of hens has also disappeared. I still have a flock secreted in my barn, but it is not considered the thing any more if you are to enjoy a high standard of living. Hens, if kept at all, must be kept in multiples of a thousand.

The largest building that has been erected in this vicinity in recent years is an egg factory—a handsome four-story ovulation arena housing about eight thousand birds. An elevator lifts boughten grain to a high bin, from which an endless chain carries it around the pens in troughs. The owner, one helper, and the Bangor Hydro-Electric Company can take care of the whole operation. The pens do not contain roosts and dropping boards, which are now old hat. The modern hen just sleeps around.” • Letter from the East By E. B. White November 25, 1960

Marshal McLuhan’s work predates and predicts social media.*

“Herbert Marshall McLuhan[a] CC (1911–1980) was a Canadian philosopher. His work is one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, McLuhan studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his teaching career as a professor of English at several universities in the US and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life.

McLuhan coined the expression "the medium is the message" and the term global village, and predicted the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented. He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, though his influence began to wane in the early 1970s. In the years after his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles. With the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web, interest was renewed in his work and perspective." • Wikipedia

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"In the early 1960s, McLuhan wrote that the visual, individualistic print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called "electronic interdependence": when electronic media replaces visual culture with aural/oral culture. In this new age, humankind will move from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, with a "tribal base." McLuhan's coinage for this new social organization is the global village." • Wikipedia

"In his 1989 posthumous book, The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century, McLuhan, collaborating with Bruce R. Powers, provided a strong conceptual framework for understanding the cultural implications of the technological advances associated with the rise of a worldwide electronic network. This is a major work of McLuhan's because it contains the most extensive elaboration of his concept of Acoustic Space, and it provides a critique of standard 20th century communication models such as the Shannon–Weaver model. McLuhan distinguishes between the existing worldview of Visual Space – a linear, quantitative, classically geometric model – and that of Acoustic Space – a holistic, qualitative order with a complex intricate paradoxical topology. "Acoustic Space has the basic character of a sphere whose focus or center is simultaneously everywhere and whose margin is nowhere." The transition from Visual to Acoustic Space was not automatic with the advent of the global network, but would have to be a conscious project. The "universal environment of simultaneous electronic flow" inherently favors right-brain Acoustic Space, yet we are held back by habits of adhering to a fixed point of view. There are no boundaries to sound. We hear from all directions at once. Yet Acoustic and Visual Space are, in fact, inseparable. The resonant interval is the invisible borderline between Visual and Acoustic Space.

This is like the television camera that the Apollo 8 astronauts focused on the Earth after they had orbited the moon." • Wikipedia