Speaking at St. Louis University in 1975, Marshall McLuhan made the observation, "The Third World is the special creation of electric speed. It is created by the Fourth World that goes around the other three. The First World is industrial society. The Second World is Russian Communism. The Third World doesn't have either. All have the Fourth World, the one you never hear about, the electric environment.
"Even the Third World has radio. The Arab World is a nice example of the Third World that entered the First World simply by hooking their computers into the pricing information. The control over our economy is gone. Through the use of computers, big multinational companies can by-pass national economies and plug into pricing systems anywhere in the world.
"Instead of being guided by the old law of supply and demand, they can know instantly what a product is selling for in that country and price it for that area. Through electronics, the big companies have by-passed currencies. I'm the only communications man who studies the effects of an innovation ... My approach is studying the effects of the innovation on the community.
"In the case of one, the telephone, the real change comes with the environment created to serve it – not your private use. The telephone needs a huge environment of services to support it. When you speed up a service from letter speed to instant you drastically change a business structure that depended on slower memos and intercoms for communication.
"The telephone completely by-passes the old organization chart – you are instantly in touch with the man at the top. When the telephone rings, you feel an urge to answer it. The telephone is powerful, despotic. Few people can ignore it and say, 'I'm busy.' You cannot use a telephone as background music – or a television, either. Both are too demanding.
"But the new electric speed creates specialized jobs, and the new executive has to switch jobs quickly. Women's Lib is related to this in an important way. Women are more adaptable at this flexible shifting than men. Women are now (in 1975) being used more. Women's Lib is not an answer to the maiden's prayer, but the creating of a new prayer.
"The speed-up creates shifts from jobs to roles. The specialized executive drops out. He can’t keep up, can’t adapt. New kinds of people come in – those who are good at role playing. An actor who can only play one role is not wanted; neither is an executive who can do only one job. The old politician could afford to be himself. The new one must be a role player. Richard Nixon was an old-style politician. He had no capacity to role play. He was serious, grim, rigid."
In August 1973, Richard Nixon delivered a second address to the nation on Watergate. Marshall McLuhan made the comment, "What Watergate has disclosed is no more than what occurs in the daily routine of the commercial sector, where 'espionage' becomes a daily strategy of survival. The speed-up on services and information for decision-making releases civil war in any large organization.
"New series and new environments of information blur old patterns of power and identity and inspire new struggles for patterns of power and identity. Today (in 1973), information technology promotes wars within large corporate structures which are exhibited as dramas in the press and on TV and in our living rooms. I have written elsewhere: 'Today, the Commander in Chief, President Nixon, is looking rather fragile and inadequate simply because his advisers are so brittle and specialist.'
"Long accustomed to living in the relative security of their niche in a hierarchical organization, then suddenly find themselves in the very unhappy hunting grounds of a newly 'wired planet.' In the electric information environment, the single job tends to move its occupant toward role-playing or flexible interplay among a diversity of related jobs. The specialism of the old public relations function is increasingly assumed as a mask or role by the individual jobholder.
"The new information environment of our electric time encourages everybody to assume a part in the global theater … In the world of the wired planet, even a small bit of 'coverage' represents participation in multibillion dollar services which have become, in turn, the principal means of creating wealth from day to day.
President Nixon occupies a very dramatic spot between the old and new politics, in the drama of the old private ethic and the new corporate imagery.
"The permissiveness of the 1950s suddenly signaled the decline of private identity and the corresponding increase of corporate awareness, both of which were much enhanced by the advent of TV, for TV brought the outside inside the American home, thus submitting the world of private goals to the unremitting inspection by our social ideals.
"For centuries Americans had gone outside to be alone and had gone inside to be warm and sociable. This basic pattern had reversed the custom of the rest of mankind. Suddenly, TV had brought America into line with Europe and Asia. Since TV, the young, at least, tend to go outside to be with people and inside to be alone. Consequently, when the outside came into our sitting rooms by TV, a revolution of conscience occurred and the rigors of our highest ethical ideals were suddenly applied to the public sector of social and political action.
"The Watergate affair had revealed the transfer of slack, private ethics to the public arena just when a revolution in moral conscience had occurred in the people. That is, since TV the rigors of the old personal ethic have been transferred to the world of individual action. Rigor and permissiveness have strangely altered their areas of operation.
"Mr. Nixon appears, at least, to be saddled with the image of private permissiveness extended to the public sphere of new ethical absolutism. That is, just when public attitudes had reversed the old political order by demanding the most scrupulous behavior in public places, the Watergate investigation revealed the patterns of former public permissiveness.
"With the great decline in private identity via participation and merging, many people are inclined to be permissive in the private sector while demanding altogether new absolutist standards in public life.
One reversal pattern that is worth watching in the new information environment is the flip that tends to occur when any figure is given conspicuous treatment as a 'villain'.
"Just by observing or 'putting on' the image of such figures, especially when they are held up for a stretch of time, the public tends to identify with them and to feel that it is they, the public, who are really on trial. Just to the degree that a figure is permitted to entertain, or even to hold the attention of the public, the coverage that he gets is actually taken, as it were, out of the public hide.
"To the degree that he wears the public as his costume, he can easily flip into the mode of public hero, or antihero. Such would appear to be the magic by which multitudes of malefactors have in the past been elevated to the status of public favorites. It is not necessary to argue that Jack the Ripper belongs in this category, but perhaps Lieutenant Calley did.
"Nobody who represents a considerable proportion of the community can be given a great deal of public coverage without garnering a great deal of public acclaim and sympathy at the same time.
In our new information world, when specialists wilt on the vine or on the organization tree, it is an everyday occurrence for someone to 'fall out of his tree.'
"Today (in 1973) is the age of the dropout and it is important to note that the dropouts of all kinds are people who are trying to 'get in touch.' Touch is the world of the interval between the wheel and the axle, for example, and touch is the world of 'play' and of interplay, and if there is one area in which President Nixon has been notably defective, it is precisely the world of play and flexibility. If he were, therefore, to drop out, he would automatically re-establish this interval of play between himself and his ground, which might at once end the bind in his present situation and restore him to 'touch' with the public."
