McLuhan talking in ‘A Matter of Faith‘, a 1972 interview with Fr Patrick Peyton:
It’s perfectly obvious that the family has been ripped off, as it were. In our kind of world the extreme mobility of the hardware components of the world around it have destroyed the community in which the family normally is embedded. The matrix of the family, the community, has been ripped off by new instruments of transportation which simply eliminate the neighborliness and the natural rapport that men have with one another by proximity and daily dialogue and familiarity. It is the daily dialogue and familiarity that has been ripped off by rapid transport so that people now go as quickly to Berlin (…) or to Moscow (…) as formerly they made a short journey (…) Now this has temporarily, at least, destroyed what we call community and so the family is left isolated — the nuclear family [today is] stark naked, unsupported by community. Now a family in which you have no [surrounding] community is naturally one that is put under a terrible stress. If only the members of the family are there to constitute community and neighborliness this is surely [only the] bare bones [of community] and it’s a pretty stark situation.
And in 1974:
In a world of perpetual motion and high mobility there can be no meaningful community, since by definition, all we really have in common is the mobility; and the one thing we depend upon is change. The mobility itself is inseparable from our new affluent technologies which demand that we become their servo-mechanisms. (Foreword to Abortion in Perspective)