Excerpted from a 1967 documentary featuring Marshall McLuhan.
The electric age is changing you. It is changing your family, is changing your neighborhood, it's changing your education, it's changing your job, it's changing your government, it's changing your relationship to others. These little circuits are making our world go. We are in a period of fantastic change that's coming about at fantastic speed. Your life is changing dramatically and you are numb to it.
Today's world is the new electric world, where everybody is involved in everybody. Where everybody is involved in complex processes that are going on in the total environment. The old identity cards that used to constitute private identity, the old means of finding out "who am I", will not work. People now have to encounter themselves in their inner world in order to know who they are.
All media are extensions of some human faculty, mental or physical. The wheel is an extension of the foot. The book is an extension of the eye. Clothing is an extension of the skin. Electric circuitry is an extension of the central nervous system. The extension of any one sense displaces the other senses and alters the way we think, the way we see the world and ourselves.
In the electric age, you don't have a continuity in the old sense; everything happens at once; everything goes over everything else, and everything affects everything else. When many of these developments begin to occur in many forms at once, at very high speeds, it becomes easy to perceive the pattern.