I've been reading the works of Marshall McLuhan recently, or at least I have been reading the few partially destroyed books of his we have left inside Thunder Mountain. I am particularly enjoying reading from what is left of his book, "The Gutenberg Galaxy." As a media theorist, his ideas are quite interesting in light of the events of the last 15 years. In any ways, humanity has returned full circle to the traditional tribal village as a result of the Big Death. Reading McLuhan is helping me to make sense of our new, yet historically quite old, forms of social interaction and communication.

In the outside world, bartering is the means of exchange, and people rely upon word of mouth for the spread of information. Clocks have stopped working, and our sense of time has reverted back to reliance upon the biological clock to determine one's sense of time. Many people are illiterate and cannot read, and no new books are being produced. Our Thunder Mountain teams work by networking with isolated communities, bringing back more information about the world based on what is told. Already, knowledge of the world passes from our generation to the next through verbal communication. Our children are being raised in a world that has reverted back to tribalism based upon oral culture. According to McLuhan, speech is an emotionally laden form of communication, which results in a passionate and interdependent community. In this new order we live in, people are very interdependent on one another. No one has the resources to be able to survive thoroughly on their own. Some people grow foods, others scavenge what they can find, some try to produce by hand, others offer services for which they have some training or knowledge. For humanity to survive, we need each other.