You Had to Be There (Page 5)

Reading this book I was prompted to ask myself whether another global upheaval like 1968 could happen again. I came to the conclusion that it is almost inevitable. In France today the two Trotskyist groups that came to the fore in 1968 recently obtained 31 percent support in an opinion poll, ahead of the Socialists as well as the Communists. But this is not the reason another test looms. It is because we really have now reached the interactive stage of the communications revolution. In 1964 McLuhan gave a brilliantly prescient summary of this revolution, in a passage quoted in Nairn's 1968 essay:

Wealth and work become information factors and totally new structures are needed.... With electronic technology, the new kinds of instant interdependence and interprocess that take over production, also enter the markets and social organizations. For this reason markets and education designed to cope with the products of servile toil and mechanical production are no longer adequate. Our education has long ago acquired the fragmentary and piece-meal character of mechanism. It is now under increasing pressure to acquire the depth and inter-relation that are indispensable in the all-at-once world of electric organization.

All these processes are far more advanced today than they were in 1968. The world is no longer divided by the cold war. It's true that the Islamic world is culturally resistant to the West, but it is now within the same global communications space. All this persuades me that there is a greater potential today for a type of "global storm" that will see even stranger alignments and interconnections. So perhaps, as we used to say, 1968 was just a rehearsal. The actors were still trusting too much to improvisation and had yet really to understand their parts. Will their successors be better prepared next time?

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