The invention of the printing press initiated the shift in
man's identity as a tribal being to one of singular identity - an explorer, a frontiersman,
a thought-leader - an individual. The printing press brought literacy, and
literacy brought the dissolution of the group, as the medium of print
engendered a new-found sense of individualism. However, in becoming literate,
we also lose this sense of the 360 environment – a surround sound view of life,
where all the senses are equally engaged.
The notion of reading and understanding through print is both serial and
personal. Through literacy, the search for meaning was found in the lonely
process of reading and thinking, and establishing identity as an individual
with a personal interpretation of the words and concepts delivered one at a
time through sense the of sight.
In this new literate world, in McLuhan’s terms, we traded an
ear for an eye. What was once a community storytelling experience, became a private
and image-rich experience of reading a book. While literacy for the common
person took decades to accomplish, the printing press nevertheless set in place
the medium through which individual literacy would come to modern,
pre-industrial man. Orated stories may be subject to change and embellishment over
the generations, but with books, the story stays fixed. The concepts and
interpretations understood in the context of the time in which they were read.
McLuhan makes the point that the concept for the words “to read”
means “to guess”. He further explains
that reading, then, is a process of rapid guessing. Picking the right meaning
of words – especially words with multiple meanings – in the context of the
other words around them, requires rapid guessing. As a result, he says, “that is why a good
reader tends to be a quick decision-maker; and a good reader…..tends to make a good
executive”. Carrying this concept
further, good executives are needed in organizations and bureaucracies, for
their ability to make decisions and for their leadership. This is a very
individualized function – as is reading. Groups don’t lead, individuals do. Our
organizational constructs of legal entities such as governments and companies
are built around the decisiveness of leaders maximizing the productivity of
individuals in collections. But this is not the same as the group. Sure, there
are elements of group – people may be proud of where they work or feel a sense
of camaraderie with their fellow workers. But to be sure, promotions,
recognition, pay and rewards are all at the individual level. And when the
workday is done, people retreat to their individual homes, each “worlds” apart
from the workplace. Clearly, the work of Edward Demming has had a mitigating
effect on the role of the individual in organizations over the last
half-century, as his teaching elevated the goals of the “village output” over
the individual’s goals by way of his “Quality” measurements. Interestingly,
Demming’s work was first accepted in the East, as the management teams of the
industrialized West saw no need for his concepts of quality. The West had
cornered the market of consumerism, and saw no need for change from the rugged
individualism which had gotten it to that point.
Individualism is still the cornerstone of modern, western,
industrial and post-industrial society. Those who work hardest get ahead. Those
who are appealing to voters get voted into office and control bureaucracies.
Correspondingly, the role of government in western society has had a long,
slow, shift from being the protector of the group – with certain inalienable
individual rights – to the elevation of protection of individual’s rights over
that of the group. To wit, 76 of the 85 cases before the Supreme Court this
year concern the rights of the individual.
With the advent of electronic media, the literate man began
to re-engage with his other senses again – more than just his sense of sight. The purely visual media, such as print and the
visual arts, can be viewed with a sense of detachment, but the aural media and acoustic
media – and McLuhan counted television among the acoustic media – are engaging,
and enveloping media. In McLuhan’s words, “they work us over”, “they bump us
up”, they interrupt us and get our attention; they engage us. We become
immersed in this new media, and through this immersion, there is a loss of individual
identity, and a new search for meaning in the group; in the “village” which is
attached to that particular medium. While the content may shape one’s path for
that search, it is the medium, itself, which is the message – that we are a
product of our village, first and foremost, and our identity is part of the larger
identity of our group.
In that sense, we have come full circle from being tribal in
our relationships and search for meaning to being individual in our pursuits,
to once again becoming tribal in our search for meaning and context. The new
media and social media, however, take this concept of retribalization to whole
new levels. Our village cuts across geographies, political boundaries, and
cultures, instantaneously; and it can grow to a population of over 50 million
in less than a year, as it did for the video-sharing site, ViVo. But there’s another dimension of
retribalization. We are now engaged, not just aurally, but tactilely – and this
is the essence of what McLuhan calls “acoustic”. Our senses are engulfed as we
participate in and create our own media. Where radio and television are one (or
few) to many, social media are anyone to any; and messages we create can be delivered
on many media at one time. Television may or may not retribalize us. But the
medium of TV was an important stepping stone to bring the immersive senses back
into play with new media and social media – away from the singularity of the sense
of sight.
This move to retribalization, however, does not mean we
become illiterate, in the sense that we return to the tribal man of
pre-printing press. Rather we adopt a new literacy – one which is poorly
understood in the context of our current individual structures. The futurist,
Alvin Toffler said “the illiterate person of the twenty-first century is not
someone who cannot read and write, but the person who cannot learn, un-learn,
and relearn”.
Now, here is the rub. We live in a world where political,
industrial, and even post-industrial organizational and bureaucratic structures
are stuck in the literate world of individualism. Eddie Obeng, in his June, 2012
talk at TEDGlobal, in Edinburgh, Scotland said, “We spend our time responding
rationally to a world which we understand and recognize, but which no longer
exists”. Perhaps our most important work
as media psychologists comes in helping public and private organizations and
institutions understand the dramatic shift in society from individualism back
to tribalism and its implications on our systems of education, enterprise, and
governance. These are all structures we
respond to rationally, because we understand them and recognize them; they are
so familiar to us that they are part of the “ground” of our western society –
but they were built for a world which no longer exists. However, as Ohler sees
it, these individual structures are giving way to older structures as man becomes
more tribal and less a being of solitude. It’s as if we’re returning to the
pre-industrial family dinner-table discussion; bringing the “front porch” back
to the position of figure in our culture. The car, the freeway system, the
airplane, the telephone, and the computer allowed us all to maintain our
extended family while the individual and frontiersman in all of us caused us to
move physically further and further apart. The new media work not because they
somehow bridge the gulf that we’ve created by our distance, but because they
return us to something very familiar – something old and comfortable. Bringing
meaningful understanding to society is to bring these old structures to the
position of “figure” in our culture, where the issues and options are debated,
researched, discussed and analyzed. In helping create this tribal discussion,
we help create a platform for safe change as we replace old structures with new
ones –or older ones, as the case may be.
The implications for education, enterprise, and governance are enormous
with this facilitated shift in identity.
The Arab Spring gave us all a glimpse of what happens when
the individualism of totalitarianism - with no prospect for change and no willingness
to understand - runs afoul of the tribal man of social media. Malcolm
Muggeridge observed that both capitalism and totalitarianism have the same end
in mind; just different means of achieving it. We have a worthy task in helping
society understand through learning, un-learning and relearning the message of
the media, else capitalism and democracy, as we know them today, will become unwitting
victims of the impatience of tribal man, as well.
Covey, Stephen M. R. (2006). The speed of trust. (p.177). New York, N.Y.
Free Press.
Hunter, Ian (1980). Malcolm Muggeridge: A Life. New York,
N.Y. HarperCollins.
McLuhan, Marshall (1979). The medium is the message. ABC Radio National Network, Australia.
Retrieved on 10/15/12 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImaH51F4HBw&feature=related
McLuhan, Marshall; Fiore, Quentin
(1967). The medium is the massage. Berkeley,
CA. Gingko Press.
Obeng, Eddie (June 2012). TEDGlobal. Edinburgh, Scotland.
Retrieved on 10/16/12 from http://www.ted.com/talks/eddie_obeng_smart_failure_for_a_fast_changing_world.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TEDTalks_video+%28TEDTalks+Main+%28SD%29+-+Site%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher
U.S Supreme Court, 2011-2012 cases. Retrieved on 10/17/12
from http://www.reuters.com/supreme-court/2011-2012
Wolfe, Tom (1968). The pump house gang. What if he is right? (pp. 119-154). New York,
N.Y. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
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