The Homogenized Urban Society

The following is an excerpt from an email sent from Art to Will on 10 November 2015.

Henry Ford with 1921 Model T

My information on McLuhan's view is from an interview: "Print centralizes socially and fragments psychically, whereas the electric media bring man together in a tribal village that is a rich and creative mix, where there is actually more room for creative diversity than within the homogenized mass urban society of Western man."

Maybe this is what you're talking about regarding greater conflict:

The tribe, you see, is not conformist just because it’s inclusive; after all, there is far more diversity and less conformity within a family group than there is within an urban conglomerate housing thousands of families. It’s in the village where eccentricity lingers, in the big city where uniformity and impersonality are the milieu. The global-village conditions being forged by the electric technology stimulate more discontinuity and diversity and division than the old mechanical, standardized society; in fact, the global village makes maximum disagreement and creative dialog inevitable. Uniformity and tranquillity are not hallmarks of the global village; far more likely are conflict and discord as well as love and harmony—the customary life mode of any tribal people.

In other words, he likens the inevitable conflict to that which occurs in a family. Fragmentation and militarism—another kind of conflict—is the kind driven by alphabetic literacy. Arguably, the latter kind of conflict has been the more brutal of the two. Henry Ford's (Don Gilber's?) ambitions seem to fit the "urban conglomerate housing thousands of family" description better.

Here's another awesome one:

Literate mechanical society separated the individual from the group in space, engendering privacy; in thought, engendering point of view; and in work, engendering specialism—thus forging all the values associated with individualism. But at the same time, print technology has homogenized man, creating mass militarism, mass mind and mass uniformity; print gave man private habits of individualism and a public role of absolute conformity. That is why the young today welcome their retribalization, however dimly they perceive it, as a release from the uniformity, alienation and dehumanization of literate society. [italics are mine]