Marshall McLuhan knew what we were. And what we were in for.

A Letter from Guest Editors, Neil Andersen and Carol Arcus

“[The] instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all of us all at once. Ours is a brand new world of all-at-once-ness. The global village is not created by the motor car or even by the airplane. It’s created by instant electronic information movement.

The global village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as a little town where everybody is maliciously engaged in poking his nose into everybody else’s business.

The global village is a world in which you don’t necessarily have harmony. You have extreme concern with everybody else’s business and much involvement in everybody else’s life.

It’s a sort of Ann Landers column writ large, and it doesn’t necessarily mean harmony and peace and quiet, but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else’s affairs.

And so the global village is as big as a planet and as small as the village post office.” – Marshall McLuhan.*

Marshall McLuhan knew what we were. And what we were in for.

We live in the media environment that Marshall McLuhan described 60 years ago, but intensified by algorithmic systems and generative AI that shape not just what we know, but how we perceive, think, and relate to one another. Rather than conceptualizing this electronic environment—this water in which we swim—as a linear chain of cause-and-effect processes, he conceived of it as a mosaic of interconnected fragments–an ecosystem dependent on seemingly improbable connections.

This issue of the Journal of Media Literacy presents a mosaic of those ideas, across different media, about this man’s ideas and this – our – world.

To think with and through Marshall McLuhan is to think mosaically—laterally , through patterns and connections rather than a straight line. It’s a way of thinking that mirrors the human brain, and especially McLuhan’s own: made up of fragments, associations, and sudden flashes of insight—think of his “probes” here. A mosaic—like a tiled floor—is built from small pieces placed beside one another because of their relationship in colour or shape; the meaning doesn’t reside in any one piece, but emerges through the whole. McLuhan’s fascination with Finnegans Wake is relevant here. What can seem, up close, like a jumble of words begins to form meaning when the reader steps back—a fitting metaphor for the twentieth-century experience that Joyce evoked through his non-linear, post-literate narrative, suggesting that some stories cannot be told in a neat, grammatical sequence.

That same idea shapes this issue. The articles sit alongside each other, inviting us to create the connections between them. In this way, media ecology also fits: our digital environment works in an “all-at-once” way, where individual posts or messages may seem independent and disconnected, but instead interconnect to create patterns that tell a larger, more complex story of interdependence. The challenge is learning how to see those patterns, and to recognize which fragments are central to the story.

Let us go then you and I… Enjoy this mosaic as you remind yourself of McLuhan’s wordcraft:

There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.

I wouldn’t have seen it if I didn’t believe it.

Man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a metaphor?