Revolutions are rarely, if ever, bloodless.

If you want it, however, I suppose there is some consolation in the fact that this particular revolution will be televised.

But as the industry preoccupies itself with the perils and opportunities of the future, I can’t help but look back for consolation and consideration – back far beyond the confines of the year that was; back, in fact, to the year after my birth – 1969 – only to be struck by the prescience of one of our media magi, the late Marshall McLuhan.

Forgive, if you will, a long excerpt from a remarkable interview Playboy conducted with McLuhan that year:

In the past, the effects of media were experienced more gradually, allowing the individual and society to absorb and cushion their impact to some degree. Today, in the electronic age of instantaneous communication, I believe that our survival, and at the very least our comfort and happiness, is predicated on understanding the nature of our new environment, because unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitute a total and near-instantaneous transformation of culture, values and attitudes. This upheaval generates great pain and identity loss, which can be ameliorated only through a conscious awareness of its dynamics. If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves.

Survival. Great pain. Identity loss. The question of slavery to, or mastery of, the new media.

McLuhan couldn’t have been any more tuned in to the questions we face at present – exactly 40 years before they resolved to trouble us – had he had the advantage of retrospective.

So, are we demonstrating a ‘conscious awareness’ of the dynamics of this upheaval?

Depends on your interpretation of the likes of Ivan Fecan’s recent threats to sporadically go dark if CTV fails to get its fees for carriage, I suppose. (To quote another Canadian media institution, The Lowest of the Low: ‘Sometimes it’s wise to know which way the gun is pointing before you yell, ‘I see the whites of their eyes.”)

Ironically, although we’re struggling mightily at present, McLuhan went out of his way to warn us in the ’60s: ‘The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb. But the ability to perceive media-induced extensions of man, once the province of the artist, is now being expanded as the new environment of electric information makes possible a new degree of perception and critical awareness by non-artists.’

We call some of those ‘media-induced extensions of man’ social media and interactive now, in case you were wondering. And the fact that ‘non-artists’ are all over them is the root of so many of the industry’s problems.

Tough luck for us. We all should have been reading more Playboy in the ’60s.

(Or, to quote another playboy of the ’60s – JFK: ‘Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable’…if you want to get all eloquent about it.)

But, in that same interview, McLuhan does offer us a path: ‘Inherent in the artist’s creative inspiration is the process of subliminally sniffing out environmental change. It’s always been the artist who perceives the alterations in man caused by a new medium, who recognizes that the future is the present, and uses his work to prepare the ground for it. But most people, from truck drivers to the literary Brahmins, are still blissfully ignorant of what the media do to them; unaware that because of their pervasive effects on man, it is the medium itself that is the message, not the content…’

So, I guess if you really want to boil it down, the question facing us in 2010 is: When that atomic bomb detonates, stencils and all, will we choose to be slaves or will we be artists?