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 that of wearable technologies

Abstract

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 where a sort of melting pot between cultures is created, thanks also to technology, originated 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, who are 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 allowing one, on the one hand, to "wear" data thanks to Wearable Technologies as well as, on the other, to create a dynamic integration be-tween the physical and digital worlds (Phygital)