The Global Village & The Locker Room
very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations
Three years before his death in 1980, Marshall McLuhan sat down with Canadian talk-show host Mike McManus to confab about his ideas. McManus reminded him of the “global village” prediction he’d made back in the 1950s, and pointed out that electronic communication, jet travel, and every other distance-obliterating technology of the twentieth century didn’t seem to be making the world cozier or any more friendly than before.
McLuhan completely agreed.
McManus: But, I had some idea as we got global and tribal we were going to try to…
McLuhan: The closer you get together, the more you like each other? There is no evidence of that in any situation that we have ever heard of. When people get close together, they get more and more savage and impatient with each other.
McManus: Why is it? Is it because of the nature of man?
McLuhan: His tolerance is tested in those narrow circumstances very much. Village people are not that much in love with each other. The global village is a place of a very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.
McLuhan said a lot of wacky things when he was being interviewed. It was part of his schtick. But the fact that he had a schtick—and was less of a “serious” scholar than a culture critic, oracular futurist, prose poet, and provocateur bullshit artist—accounts for why he quickly became something of a historical footnote in the very academic field he pioneered. Even by the time he went on McManus’ show, his star had already dimmed.
One of his admirers, Joshua Meyrowitz, set out to tackle the subject of electronic media and its impact on society with somewhat more rigor and less mystification. Meyrowitz’s No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior is the strong pot of coffee to McLuhan’s absinthe cocktail.
To very briefly sum up Meyrowitz’s argument: the electronic media revolution consists of opening everyone’s locker rooms up to everyone else.
While we usually tend to think of situations in terms of what and who is in them, situations are also defined by what and who is outside of them. Behavior in an environment is shaped by the patterns of access to and restriction from the social information available in that environment. The way male high school students speak in a locker room, for example, is determined not only by the presence of other male students, but also by the absence of female students, parents, teachers, and principals.
A key factor in determining the extent to which a situation is isolated from other situations is the nature of the boundary line that divides the situation from other situations. The membranes around social situations affect behavior not only because they often fully include and exclude other participants, but also because they can partially include and exclude other participants. A person may be visually excluded from a situation by a wall, yet aurally included by the thinness of the visual barrier. In the same way, media may affect the definition of situations by bypassing traditional physical restrictions on information flow. Richard Nixon, for example, found that a tape recorder in the Oval Office led to his private…conversations being evaluated as public pronouncements.
…Nixon's situation is analogous to that of a single-sex group of high school students who engage in a locker-room bull session. The conversation may be full of obscenities and fantasized sexual activities, discussions of the physical characteristics of teachers, administrators, and students of the other sex, and “plots” to undermine the legitimate and smooth functioning of the school. If the students taped their locker-room bull session and listened to it, they might still find their conversations quite humorous, and they might congratulate each other on cleverly turned phrases and devilishly obscene remarks. But if the same tape were played publicly for their teachers, parents, and friends of the opposite sex, it is likely that its reception would be quite different.
Two other things to bear in mind:
Meyrowitz constrasts the types of information conveyed by nineteenth-century mass media and twentieth-century mass media. Print is communicative; electronic media is expressionistic. Print is discursive; electronic media is presentational. Text is abstract and impersonal; television is immediate and personal. It’d be one thing to read a typewritten transcript of a baby-faced fifteen-year-old telling his buddies (behind the closed door of a locker room) what he’d like to do to his attractive young algebra teacher in prurient detail. It’d be another to attach a couple of color photographs to the transcript; one of his yearbook photo, another of him leering and making hand-gestures in the middle of a colorful description of a degrading sex act. And it would be another thing still to watch and listen to him talking and leering and gesturing in a video recorded in secret. Which of these do you suppose would evoke the most intense emotional response at a PTA meeting?
The format and physical dimensions of print matter entail certain limitations in terms of accessibility. Electronic media is largely unfettered by these limitations.
So there you have it. Electronic media gives children an idea of how adults conduct themselves when there aren’t any kids around. It indicates to women what men might be doing and talking about when their wives and daughters aren’t there in the room with them. It lets voters bypass the newspaper transcript or synopsis and scrutinize the tone of voice, facial expressions, and nonverbal kinesic “language” of their elected representatives. (All of these it does with an demonstrative candor of which the printed word isn’t capable.) It delivered scenes of civil rights demonstrators getting blasted with firehoses into northern liberals’ living rooms, and gave stateside Americans a set of eyes on the ground in Vietnam. In attributing the social upheaval of the 1960s to television, McLuhan speaks cryptically of the ways in which the medium itself, no matter its content, fundamentally alters our sensibility; Meyrowitz says it was a simply a matter of unprecedented information access.
No Sense of Place was published in 1985, when the internet was in its infancy, and only about half of all American households had basic cable. When Meyrowitz describes how electronic media dissolves the barriers between remote social situations which had previously been exclusive to members of some particular in-group, he’s typically referring to network television—ABC, CBS, NBC, and maybe some assorted public access or local channels. Though he isn’t wrong about the social-behavioral effects of television in the second half of the twentieth century, the causes and effects both seem pretty tame by modern standards.
In 1980, the cable channel CNN—the first-ever round-the-clock news station—made its debut. For our purposes here, I can just direct you to some pertinent remarks by the immortal Bill Hicks and leave it at that.
Have you ever watched CNN Headline News for any length of time? It’s the most depressing fucking thing you will ever do. “WAR. FAMINE. DEATH. AIDS. HOMELESS. RECESSION. DEPRESSION. WAR. FAMINE. DEATH. AIDS.” Then you look out your window, it’s just: [cricket sounds]. Where is all this shit happening, man?
In a whole lot of cases: somewhere else. But the cable news addict can be forgiven for having a hard time telling the difference between there and here.
By the mid-1990s, when the multiplication of television channels made narrowcasting a viable alternative to the general-audience strategy employed during the decades-long reign of the three-network oligopoly, viewers were handed the keys to many more locker rooms than before. A New York atheist could tune into a televangelist’s cable show to get an idea of the flyover states’ prevailing attitudes towards abortion, gay rights, and the social safety net. A seventy-year-old Evangelical living in a Kansas retirement village could switch on MTV and gasp at the shameless depravity peddled to impressionable youngsters from the liberal coasts. In both cases, the captivated viewers invite a milieu to which they don’t belong (and/or of which they’re not the target audience) to confront them in their living rooms, and they don’t like what they see.
What then?
The atheist from New York and the Evangelical from Kansas are both reinforced in their beliefs about the sanity and goodness of their ingroup and the stupidity and turpitude of an outgroup. Even though the atheist doesn’t know a single person who tunes into The 700 Club and has little reason to worry that Pat Robertson’s flock might hijack Manhattan politics, and even though the Evangelical hasn’t seen a single teenager in town wearing the waist of their jeans around their lower thighs or flaunting a Marilyn Manson T-shirt, each seems to hear the barbarians pounding at the gates. Something has to be done. The televangelist needs to be discredited, and his flock deprogrammed. The media must be made to stop peddling filth, and the kids need someone to drag their butts to church so they can have good Christian morals instilled in them.
Maybe the atheist pens an essay for a local zine and goes out and buys another book by Carl Sagan or Bertrand Russel. Maybe the Evangelical cuts a bigger check to Jerry Falwell than usual and writes a letter to her cable provider and urges it to drop MTV. And unless they’re obsessive kooks with too much time on their hands—or are surrounded by people who remind them of their concerns and stoke their umbrage—maybe they’ll leave it at that for a while.
It was a simpler time.
The terminally online (or, if we’d like to flatter them, we could instead call them “engaged”) culture war partisans are massed in more or less the same camps they’ve been since the 1960s. Traditionalist versus progressive. The province versus the city. Dunkin versus Starbucks. Chuds versus bluehairs. Fox News versus MSNBC. The high school diploma versus the university degree. “Woke” versus anti-woke.
The internet gives each sect the means to peer into the other’s virtual locker rooms to a degree that wasn’t possible as recently as twenty years ago. They lurk on their foes’ subreddits (or the independent message boards they’ve been chased onto), scroll through their tweets, skim their favored news sites, follow (without adding or bookmarking) their aligned influencers, etc. The opposing culture warrior camps watch each other with a perspicacity driven by mutual hostility.1
I’m not going to pretend there’s an equivalence here. The cultural conservatives (or reactionaries, if you’d like) have industrialized the production of ragebait with an efficiency and distilled potency that the other side simply can’t match, or perhaps won’t stoop to. As far as I can tell, there’s no real woke analogue to Libs of TikTok, Gateway Pundit, or the Daily Mail. Nothing nearly so voluminous or sensational or cynical. At the same time, let’s also remember the cases of Justine Sacco, Emmanuel Cafferty, and Keziah Daum—and also of Amy Cooper, on whom The New York Times and other metropolitan periodicals of note solemnly poured gasoline while she was getting raked over the coals for a video posted on Facebook.
Regardless of the appropriateness or even the decency of Cooper’s behavior on that fateful day in Central Park, the fact is that she acted as though she spoke to an audience of one, when it was actually an audience of millions—and probably most of them weren’t New Yorkers themselves. By the same token, the organizers, performers, and attendees of any number of events like “Drag Your Kids to Pride” may or may not be aware that they’re not just performing for the some-dozen or so friendly faces in the venue, but also for the hundreds or thousands of decidedly hostile “protect our children” conservatives watching videos clips covertly recorded by an aspiring muckraker or posted to social media by the organizers or performers, who intended them to be viewed by community members, friends, and allies.
Obviously Cooper comes off really poorly in the “Central Park Karen” video. But it’s still sort of fascinating that an entire continent should have trained its attention and cannons on a woman none of us had ever heard of before, who lived in a city hundreds of miles away from most of us, and who (let’s be honest here) didn’t injure or kill anyone, didn’t steal or destroy anyone’s property, but made a terribly ugly presentation of herself in a video clip. Weren’t there matters closer to home we could have prioritized over a bad interaction between a pair of mean-spirited New Yorkers who hadn’t existed for us just a day previous? Was the incident really any of our business?
If you’d put that question to anyone who’d just watched the video in late May, 2020, you’d sound like an idiot at best and a malignant racist at worst.
That’s the grand illusion of electronic media. It’s the voodoo of The Spectacle. The distant supersedes the immediate. Its apparition superimposes itself upon the space we actually occupy, the situation we’re actually in, and eclipses it. For all intents and purposes, Amy Cooper was apparently threatening to weaponize the cops against Christian Cooper right in front of us. How could we not feel like we should get involved?
That’s one reason why the culture war has risen over the last several years to such a shrill pitch. These people, these boogeymen and boogeywomen who brazenly flout our cherished values and/or want to reverse decades of human progress might not live on our block. We might not work with any of them. We might not have any on our school boards or city governments. We don’t invite them to our Labor Day barbecues or attend any of the public events they crawl out for. Maybe we drive past the occasional house with a TRUMP 2024 sign in the front lawn, or the parked car with Progress flag bumper stickers, or notice the random passerby wearing a ACAB or Thin Blue Line shirt on the sidewalk—but probably we don’t speak much or have very many IRL interactions with random people flying the enemy colors.
And at the same time—it’s like they’re everywhere. They’re with us in our homes. They steal into bed with us when we lie under the covers with our devices in front of our faces. They smirk at us and challenge us, they harangue and harass us. They’re camped in our backyard. They ride with us on the train and come into the office with us. The school district in a predominately conservative rural region we’ve never even flown over is striving to whitewash the history curriculum in our liberal metropolitan suburb. Drag queens from San Francisco and New York are gathering by the hundreds in our Wyoming small town to groom our children. They must be stopped. We’ve got to push them back, to make them leave us alone. We’ve got to marginalize them. Get them fired. Morally exterminate them.
Hunter Thompson said that politics is the art of controlling one’s environment. It’s a perfectly natural desire—and a familiar one, if you’ve ever lived with multiple roommates. When you’re surrounded by other people, your overall happiness with the situation depends in large part upon how frequently they inconvenience you, offend you, and get in your way, and how capably you can persuade them to knock it off. It’s village life in miniature.
For the political animal, an exponentially extended awareness is essentially an exponentially wider environment—more groups and more territory to be brought into conformity with one’s preferences, whatever they might be. That’s the nature of the global village and its abrasive interfaces: the friction between observer and observed, control and countercontrol, all occurring across geographical divides which electronic media negates (or seems to).
Whether you’re an urban liberal who’d like to stop a school library in a county that went more than 80% for Trump from yanking LGBT-themed kids’ books from its shelves, or a rural rightoid who thinks child protective services should be sic’d on metropolitan parents who take their kids to Drag Queen Story Time, the fact is that you’d like to impose your will on people far away from you—people with whom you’re likely to never have any unmediated contact, people whose kids will never play with your kids, people to whom you don’t intend to be beholden in any way.
I can think of a word for that sort of attitude. Any guesses?
I wish I could take credit for this neat turn of phrase, but I borrowed it from a lecture by historian Christopher Clark (whom we quoted at length not long ago) about the causes of the first World War. There he was talking about Austria-Hungary and Serbia.