Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

importance in ‘post-social’ society, but something of the metaphysics of

such communities and of the theories about them needs to be examined.

The imagined ‘universal’ community

The world is getting smaller, and [people] travel faster, countries are

being brought within hours of each other instead of days, the people of

those countries are getting more and more like one great family, and

whether they like it or not one day they have to learn to live like one great

family. (From the British wartime film For Freedom, 1940)

The humanist universalism that is typified in the above statement, as much

as the mistaken way in which McLuhan’s maxim of the global village

is taken up, is one which persists today in all manner of ‘computopia’ nar-

ratives. It is not simply that the means of communication have speeded

up, but they have a density which reduces the ‘degrees of separation’

between persons. As Watts (2000) claims, with the Internet, ‘within a sig-

nificant chunk of the www every site could be reached from every other

site through about four hotlinks’ (4). Thus, in Durkheimian terms, the

‘dynamic density’ produced by such an increase in communication infra-

structure brings greater and greater numbers of persons into its orbit.

Certainly McLuhan, in his populist interpretation, has been taken up

as the patron saint of such a concept of community. As Arthur Kroker

(1995) says of McLuhan, he never deviated from the classical Catholic pro-

ject of seeking to recover the basis for a ‘new universal community’ in the

culture of technology: ‘The Christian concept of the mystical body – all

men as members of the body of Christ – this becomes technologically a

fact under electronic conditions’ (McLuhan in Stearn, 1968: 302). The

body, both mystical and sensual, is integral to McLuhan’s media cosmol-

ogy, which has undoubtedly had enduring appeal among those who con-

tinue to deify the electronic village (esp. Wiredmagazine).

McLuhan’s earlier advances of a techno-spiritualism find continuity

in the cyber-soul or the cyber-mind in which individuality itself is resolved

into a unified identity. Mark Slouka in War of the Worlds (1996) says:

... in the ver y near future, human beings will succeed in wiring themselves

together to such an extent that individualism as we know it today ... will

cease to exist. What will take its place? The great truth of our collective iden-

tity, made clear and apprehensible through the offices of that ‘global mind’,

the Net. (96)

Such a cyber-mind is close to Gibsonian renditions of cyberspace as an out-

of-body consensual hallucination which is available to be shared. A vari-

ant of this is the cybernetic unification of souls on an almost ineffable astral

level whose eternal object of desire is ‘community’. In her analysis of nar-

ratives of cyberspace as a gateway for spiritual redemption, Margaret

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