Over time, argued McLuhan, each phase had been superseded by
another mode and this had spatial ramifications. Oral communication,
by definition, restricted social interaction to relatively short distances, for example, within villages. The advent of writing and painting made the transport of ideas and cultural markers across space a lot easier leading to an increase in the ‘extensibility’ of human relations. The arrival of
the electronic age and the even greater stretching of social relations had the paradoxical effect of once again making oral communication more common. This mode echoed the first period but this time the ‘village’ was stretched globally. In the introduction to Understanding Media, McLuhan sums this up: ‘(t)oday, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned’