5

World-pool

Marshall McLuhan, interview in Playboy magazine, March 1969
 

Cataclysmic environmental changes such as these are, in and of themselves, morally neutral; it is how we perceive them and react to them that will determine their ultimate psychic and social consequences. If we refuse to see them at all, we will become their servants. It’s inevitable that the world-pool of electronic information movement will toss us all about like corks on a stormy sea, but if we keep our cool during the descent into the maelström, studying the process as it happens to us and what we can do about it, we can come through.