Marshall McLuhan’s Tribes and Our Echo Chambers

A quote that Brain Pickings dug out suggests that Marshall McLuhan didindeed predict Social Media:

These new media have made our world into a single unit. The world is now like a continually sounding tribal drum, where everybody gets the message all the time. A princess gets married in England and — boom boom boom! — we all hear about it; an earthquake in North Africa; a Hollywood star gets drunk — away go the drums again.

At about 3:45 he starts talking about the Tribal Man idea. Tribal man certainly seems to be here now – we are now certainly aligning into various tribes through social media. People are finding like minded individuals (and closing themselves into the associated echo chambers) much faster now than in the earlier days of the ‘net. Later in the video you hear the interviewer ask “is any media really that powerful”? Why yes it is.

Earlier in the video you hear McLuhan talk about “being with it”. Taking the video as a whole, maybe one of the things that we need to start talking about is the idea (mine not McLuhan’s) of “echo chamber lock in”. He starts talking about “with it” around 2:45. If we combine “with it-ness” with the tribal element, we might have something dangerous on our hands as people find themselves more completely engaged in this media that is able to play with and to and increasing number of senses.