Urban Culture: The Global Village of the Ear
The Rhythmic instinction to yield to travel beyond existing forces of life. Basically, that's tribal and if you wanna get the rhythm, then you have to join the tribe. -A Tribe Called Quest (Jive Records, 1990)
 The new media environment not only creates the environment from which a cyberpunk thrives, but it is bringing us all together into a tribal existence. The instantaneous nature of new media, where a message or piece of information can be transferred in a matter of seconds, is creating an interdependent society which is changing the way we relate with our environment, and each other (McLuhan, 1967 p. 67). The new global village that is emerging is creating a global conscious where "'time' has ceased, [and] space has vanished" (McLuhan, 1967 p. 63). We now live  in the auditory space where our pre-alphabet ancestors once resided. A purely visual means of relating to our environment is now too slow and ineffective (McLuhan, 1967 p. 63). The emergence of urban youth culture is a manifestation of McLuhan's arguments of new media's effects on our environment and the emerging global village. Hip-hop is gaining popularity not as a commercial form of music, but as an underground phenomenon that youth-who are battling a society that is trying to do today's jobs with yesterdays tools- have developed as a way of perceiving and expressing their changing environment. The youth that develop and comprise urban culture use hip-hop also as a teach-in, to let the system know that it's time to update, and change. We live in an age of discovery and exploration, not instruction and obedience, the urban culture is marching to its own rhythm and you either hear it, or you don't.
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