The main effect of electric process, Maestro McLuhan 🞶 discovered, is to retribalize the structure of psychic and social awareness. Millions of people sitting around the TV tube, CNN-style, absorbing the modern equivalent of shamanistic lore from the authorized source is closely analogous to the old tribal relations of tyrannous instruction and control. The Global Village of corporate consumer values stimulates local peoples to retrieve who they used to be as a protection for their fading identities, for electric process makes us all nobodies desperate for identity. The quest for identity, he warned, always produces violence.

The old sensibility, old values, old enmities prevail over larger-scale democratic awareness and commitment. The profound changes to the perceptual apparatus brought about by film, television, and the other mass media return us to conditions so similar to old tribal brutalities that we retrieve the joy in the mystique of violence that governed the lives of preliterate peoples. Electricity takes us back, converts the world into a circuit of neo-tribal resonance. We are replaying the archetypes of deep human experience, the exemplary models of psychic and social reality.