Following on from the anniversary of of SPLHCB at the start of June, it's also the anniversary of The Beatles performing All You Need Is Love on the first global TV broadcast. I was going to pop this in the Arts board, but as I watched the little clip it seemed to resonate on other levels.
The first most obvious is that we now see news from all round the world in real time and don't remember that this is still relatively new. We perforce process things differently now. Immediacy creates a different reaction, and we see the reactions of others, and indeed interact with them in an entirely different way. The world becomes smaller and yet the very profusion seems to make it more disparate.
Second, you look at the relative chaos and amateurish of the scenes, and contrast them to what you get when the Eurovision is held in Azerbaijan, and while the product may not have improved, the wrapping is much shinier. I have previously mentioned the feeling that at some unspecified point in my time, somewhere the colour was switched on. In part the obvious one was TV but even in the late 70s, it felt that all the colours added had been 50 shades of brown.
Obviously there is a the message, and the naive hope that the medium embodied that message, rather than is so open as to be all messages all the time. It seems that while MacLuhan was a seer, he was one with few followers. Technology is changing us in more ways than we think but it changes too fast for us to do analysis. The hippy hope of love being all you need, as ever misses the fact that live isn't all we have.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/magazine-40334902/how-the-beatles-broadcast-love-to-the-world
