Watch as Marshall McLuhan discusses civilization's return to the tribe with the emergence of electric media:

Although the video cuts off abruptly, McLuhan touches upon some of his key ideas in the segment.

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As a piece of technology, the clock is a machine that produces uniform seconds, minutes, and hours on an assembly-line pattern. Processed in this uniform way, time is separated from the rhythms of human experience. The mechanical clock, in short, helps to create the image of a numerically quantified and mechanically powered universe ... Time measured not by the uniqueness of private experience but by abstract uniform units gradually pervades all sense life, much as does the technology of writing and printing. Not only work, but also eating and sleeping, came to accommodate themselves to the clock rather than to organic needs.


--Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media