Ascesa e declino del villaggio globale: le visioni di McLuhan dall’epoca della controcultura a quella delle tecnologie indossabili

Rise and decline of the global village: McLuhan’s visions from the age of counterculture to the one of wearable technologies. McLuhan’s global village is the celebration of the electric age, that is, of a society in which the media act as an extension of the central nervous system. The ideal of a planetary village in which a sort of melting pot between cultures is created thanks also to technology, took shape starting in the 1950s in the United States. The end of the Nineties coincides with the decline of a euphoric vision that assigns communication technologies the power to transform global society, opening its borders and increasing the degree of interconnection and interdependence between its parts. The story that follows with the beginning of the new millennium is a story of a series of global crises that have shattered the myth of globalization. The point of contact between subcultures and counterculture is given by the centrality of generational conflict and opposition to the technocratic regime. The theme of youth cultures returns in several of McLuhan’s works. McLuhan intervenes to underline the paradoxical process according to which the American counterculture is the illegitimate daughter of the diffusion of TV. The Canadian scholar also states that hippies, notoriously against technology and consumption, are actually children of TV, nourished by the technological medium. We had to wait until the 1990s to see a massive return of countercultural values, which were resurrected by the worldwide spread of the internet and the new digital gurus. The term Cyberpsychedelia refers to a new vision of technology that includes the spiritual dimension of some countercultural groups or movements which, starting from the cultural melting pot of California in the 1960s, tend to spread to the rest of the planet. In the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, various aspects of Cyberpunk reflection are literally implemented by digital technologies which allow on the one hand to “wear” data thanks to Wearable Technologies, and on the other to create a dynamic integration between the physical and digital world (Phygital).