marshall
mcLuhan
he medium is the MASSA
AN
INVENTO-
RY OF
produced by j e ro m e agel
The Medium 15 1
he Massage
is a popular classic, a collide-o-scopic
journey through the Marshall McLuhan-
tooking glass, When first documented
McLuhan's prophetic perceptions on Itfe
the age of electronic information were
en perplexing. Three decades later
hts observations are disturbingly clear
remarkably accurate.
Marshall McLuhan understood the
power of the media long before those in
control did.
The Medium is the Massage presents
some of McLuhan s most amazing
insights and cognitive observations on
the global village; the rear-view mirror,
the invisible environment the end of
nature, and sensory impact set against
the everyday imagery of mass media,
consumer goods, the press, advertising,
and the arts.
First published in 1 %1 The Medium is
the Massage has sold more than one
million copies worldwide
Marshall Mclufiai received a Ph.D. from
Cambridge University in 1942, He pub-
lished The Mechanical Bride (1951). The
Gutenberg Galaxy (1962). and Understand-
ing Media (19641 His illustrated classics.
The Medium is the Massage (1967) and
War and Peace in the Global Village (1968),
both with Guentin Fiore and Jerome AgeL
reflect McLuhan s passion for knowledge,
originality, provocation, and insight,
is one of America s most
distinguished graphic designers. His office
is in New Jersey.
Jerome
has written and produced
more than fifty major books.incltiding
collaborations with Carl Sagan. Stanley
Kubrick, Buckminster Fuller and Isaac
Asimov. His office is in New York City.
Gmgko Press Inc
5768 Paradise Drive. Suae J • Corte Madera, CA 94925
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email books©gmgkopresscom
Ml p : // www>g i n g kop ress, com
Gingko Press 1 - 58423-070-3
'The major advances in civil ization are processes
that all but wreck the socie ties in which they occur.
-A. N. Whitehead
The medium, orprocess, of ourtime — electrictech-
nology — is reshaping and restructuring patterns of
social interdependence and every aspect of our
personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-
evaluate practically every thought, every action,
and every institution formerly taken for granted.
Everything is changing — you, your family, your
neighborhood, your education, your job, your gov-
ernment, your relation to "the others." And they're
changing dramatically.
Societies have always been shaped more by the
nature of the media by which men communicate
than by the content of the communication. The
alphabet, for instance, is a technology that is ab-
sorbed by the very young child in a completely
unconscious manner, by osmosis so to speak.
Words and the meaning of words predispose the
child to think and act automatically in certain ways.
The alphabet and print technology fostered and
encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of
specialism and of detachment. Electric technology
fosters and encourages unification and involve-
ment. It is impossible to understand social and
cultural changes without a knowledge of the work-
ings of media.
The older training of observation has become quite
irrelevant in this new time, because it is based on
psychological responses and concepts conditioned
by the former technology — mechanization.
Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling
of despair invariably emerge in periods of great
technological and cultural transitions. Our "Age of
30-million toy trucks were bought in the U.S. in 1966.
Anxiety" is, in great part, the result of trying to
do today's job with yesterday's tools-with yester-
day's concepts.
Youth instinctively understands the present en-
vironment-the electric drama. It lives mythically
and in depth. This is the reason for the great
alienation between generations. Wars, revolutions,
civil uprisings are interfaces within the new en-
vironments created by electric informational media.
10
"In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember
that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from
sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the
perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all
costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode
in which human intelligence functions. Our reason-
ings grasp at straws for premises and float on
gossamers for deductions."
— A. N. Whitehead, "Adventures in Ideas."
Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasing
old categories— for probing around. When two
seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively
poised, put in apposition in new and unique ways,
startling discoveries often result.
Learning, the educational process, has long been
associated only with the glum. We speak of the
"serious" student. Our time presents a unique
opportunity for learning by means of humor— a
perceptive or incisive joke can be more meaning-
ful than platitudes lying between two covers.
"The Medium is the Massage" is a look-around to
see what's happening. It is a collide-oscope of
interfaced situations.
Students of media are persistently attacked as
evaders, idly concentrating on means or processes
rather than on "substance." The dramatic and rapid
changes of "substance" elude these accusers.
Survival is not possible if one approaches his
environment, the social drama, with a fixed, un-
changeable point of view — the witless repetitive
response to the unperceived.
you
How much do you make? Have you
ever contemplated suicide? Are you
now or have you ever been... ? Are you
aware of the fact...? I have here be-
fore me.... Electrical information de-
vices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-
tomb surveillance are causing a very
serious dilemma between our claim to
privacy and the community's need to
know. The older, traditional ideas of
private, isolated thoughts and actions —
the patterns of mechanistic technolo-
gies—are very seriously threatened by
new methods of instantaneous electric
information retrieval, by the electrically
computerized dossier bank— that one
big gossip column that is unforgiving,
unforgetful and from which there is no
redemption, no erasure of early "mis-
takes." We have already reached a
point where remedial control, born out
of knowledge of media and their total
effects on all of us, must be exerted.
How shall the new environment be pro-
grammed now that we have become so
involved with each other, now that aM
of us have become the unwitting work
force for social change? What's that
buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzing?
12
your family
The family circle has widened. The
worldpool of information fathered by
electric media— movies, Telstar, flight-
far surpasses any possible influence
mom and dad can now bring to bear.
Character no longer is shaped by only
two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all
the world's a sage.
14
your
neighborhood
Electric circuitry has overthrown the
regime of "time" and "space" and pours
upon us instantly and continuously the
concerns of all other men. It has re-
constituted dialogue on a global scale.
Its message is Total Change, ending
psychic, social, economic, and political
parochialism. The old civic, state, and
national groupings have become un-
workable. Nothing can be further from
the spirit of the new technology than
"a place for everything and everything
in its place." You can't go home again.
16
your
education
There is a world of difference between
the modern home environment of inte-
grated electric information and the
classroom. Today's television child is
attuned to up-to-the-minute "adult"
news — inflation, rioting, war, taxes,
crime, bathing beauties — and is
bewildered when he enters the nine-
teenth-century environment that still
characterizes the educational estab-
lishment where information is scarce
but ordered and structured by frag-
mented, classified patterns, subjects,
and schedules. It is naturally an en-
vironment much like any factory set-up
with its inventories and assembly lines.
The "child" was an invention of the
seventeenth century; he did not exist
in, say, Shakespeare's day. He had, up
until that time, been merged in the
adult world and there was nothing that
could be called childhood in our sense.
Today's child is growing up absurd, be-
cause he lives in two worlds, and neither
of them inclines him to grow up. Grow-
ing up— that is our new work, and it is
total. Mere instruction will not suffice.
18
your job
"When this circuit learns your job, what
are you going to do?"
"Jobs" represent a relatively recent
pattern of work. From the fifteenth
century to the twentieth century, there
is a steady progress of fragmentation
of the stages of work that constitute
"mechanization" and "specialism."
These procedures cannot serve for sur-
vival or sanity in this new time.
Under conditions of electric circuitry,
all the fragmented job patterns tend to
blend once more into involving and
demanding roles or forms of work that
more and more resemble teaching,
learning, and "human" service, in the
older sense of dedicated loyalty.
Unhappily, many well-intentioned politi-
cal reform programs that aim at the
alleviation of suffering caused by un-
employment betray an ignorance of the
true nature of media-influence.
"Come into my parlor," said the com-
puter to the specialist.
20
your
government
Nose-counting, a cherished part of the
eighteenth-century fragmentation proc-
ess, has rapidly become a cumber-
some and ineffectual form of social
assessment in an environment of in-
stant electric speeds. The public, in the
sense of a great consensus of separate
and distinct viewpoints, is finished. To-
day, the mass audience (the successor
to the "public") can be used as a cre-
ative, participating force. It is, instead,
merely given packages of passive en-
tertainment. Politics offers yesterday's
answers to today's questions.
A new form of "politics" is emerging,
and in ways we haven't yet noticed.
The living room has become a voting
booth. Participation via television in
Freedom Marches, in war, revolution,
pollution, and other events is changing
everything.
22
there
is
absolutely
no
inevitability
as
long
as
there
is
a
willingness
to
contemplate
what
is
happening
"the others"
The shock of recognition! In an elec-
tric information environment, minority
groups can no longer be contained—
ignored. Too many people know too
much about each other. Our new en-
vironment compels commitment and
participation. We have become irrevo-
cably involved with, and responsible
for, each other.
24
26
All media work us over completely. They are so
pervasive in their personal, political, economic,
aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social
consequences that they leave no part of us un-
touched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the
massage. Any understanding of social and cultural
change is impossible without a knowledge of the
way media work as environments.
All
media
are
extensions
of
some
human
faculty —
psychic
or
physical.
t
the book
is an extension of the eye
clothing,an extension of the skin.
electric circuitry,
an extension of
the
central
nervous
system
41
Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us
unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension
of any one sense alters the way we think and act—
the way we perceive the world.
When
these
ratios
change,
men change.
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45
The dominant organ of sensory and social orienta-
tion in pre-alphabet societies was the ear —
"hearing was believing." The phonetic alphabet
forced the magic world of the ear to yield to the
neutral world of the eye. Man was given an eye
for an ear.
Western history was shaped for some three thou-
sand years by the introduction of the phonetic
alephbet, a medium that depends solely on the eye
for comprehension. The alphabet is a construct of
fragmented bits and parts which have no semantic
meaning in themselves, and which must be strung
together in a line, bead-like, and in a prescribed
order. Its use fostered and encouraged the habit
of perceiving all environment in visual and spatial
terms — particularly in terms of a space and of a
time that are uniform,
c,o,n,t,i,n,u,o,u,s
and
c-o-n-n-e-c-t-e-d.
The line, the continuum
— this sentence is a prime example-
became the organizing principle of life. "As we
begin, so shall we go." "Rationality" and logic
came to depend on the presentation of connected
and sequential facts or concepts.
For many people rationality has the connotation
of uniformity and connectiveness. "I don't follow
you" means "1 don't think what you're saying is
rational."
Visual space is uniform, continuous, and con-
nected. The rational man in our Western culture
is a visual man. The fact that most conscious ex-
perience has little "visuality" in it is lost on him.
Rationality and visuality have long been inter-
changeable terms, but we do not live in a primarily
visual world any more.
The fragmenting of activities, our habit of thinking
in bits and parts — "specialism"— reflected the step-
by-step linear departmentalizing process inherent
in the technology of the alphabet.
"The eye— it cannot choose but see;
we cannot bid the ear be still;
our bodies feel, where'erthey be, M
against or with our will."
—Wordsworth 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 • 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 r
Printing, a ditto device
Printing, a ditto device
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Printing, a ditto device
Printing, a ditto device
Printing, a ditto device
Printing, a ditto device
Printing, a ditto device
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Printing, a ditto device
Printing, a ditto device
Printing, a ditto device
Printing, a ditto device
Printing, a ditto device
Printing, a ditto device
48
Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic
space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the
dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by
primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social
chart of this bog.
The goose quill put an end to talk. It abolished
mystery; it gave architecture and towns; it brought
roads and armies, bureaucracy. It was the basic
metaphor with which the cycle of civilization be-
gan, the step from the dark into the light of the
mind. The hand that filled the parchment page
built a city.
Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise,
Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes?
That we by tracing magic lines are taught,
How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?
Printing, a ditto device
50
Printing, a ditto device
Printing, a ditto device confirmed and
extended the new visual stress. It provided the
first uniformly repeatable "commodity," the first as-
sembly line — mass production.
It created the portable book, which men could read
in privacy and in isolation from others. Man could
now inspire — and conspire.
Like easel painting, the printed book added much
to the new cult of individualism. The private, fixed
point of view became possible and literacy con-
ferred the power of detachment, non-involvement.
Printing, a ditto device
Printing, a ditto device
Printing, a ditto device
Printing, a ditto device
Printing, a ditto device
Printing, a ditto device
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The Renaissance Legacy.
The Vanishing Point = Self-Effacement,
The Detached Observer.
No Involvement!
The viewer of Renaissance art is systematically
placed outside the frame of experience. A piazza
for everything and everything in its piazza.
The instantaneous world of electric informational
media involves all of us, all at once. No detachment
or frame is possible.
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61
"A cell for citters to cit in."
The idea of detention in a closed space as a form
of human punitive corrective action seems to have
come in very much in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries — at the time perspective and pictorial
space was developing in our Western world. The
whole concept of enclosure as a means of con-
straint and as a means of classifying doesn't work
as well in our electronic world. The new feeling
that people have about guilt is not something that
can be privately assigned to some individual, but
is, rather, something shared by everybody, in some
mysterious way. This feeling seems to be returning
to our midst. In tribal societies we are told that
it is a familiar reaction, when some hideous event
occurs, for some people to say, "How horrible it
must be to feel like that," instead of blaming some-
body for having done something horrible. This feel-
ing is an aspect of the new mass culture we are
moving into — a world of total involvement in which
everybody is so profoundly involved with every-
body else and in which nobody can really imagine
what private guilt can be anymore.
63
Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness. "Time"
has ceased, "space" has vanished. We now live in
a global village. ..a simultaneous happening. We
are back in acoustic space. We have begun again
to structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emo-
tions from which a few centuries of literacy
divorced us.
We have had to shift our stress of attention from
action to reaction. We must now know in advance
the consequences of any policy or action, since
the results are experienced without delay. Because
of electric speed, we can no longer wait and see.
George Washington once remarked, "We haven't
heard from Benj. Franklin in Paris this year. We
should write him a letter."
At the high speeds of electric communication,
purely visual means of apprehending the world are
no longer possible; they are just too slow to be
relevant or effective.
Unhappily, we confront this new situation with an
enormous backlog of outdated mental and psycho-
logical responses. We have been left d-a-n-
g-l-i-n-g. Our most impressive words and thoughts
betray us— they refer us only to the past, not to
the present.
Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one
another. Information pours upon us, instantane-
ously and continuously. As soon as information is
acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer
information. Our electrically-configured world has
forced us to move from the habit of data classifica-
tion to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no
longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step,
because instant communication insures that all
factors of the environment and of experience co-
exist in a state of active interplay.
We have now become aware of the possibility of
arranging the entire human environment as a work
of art, as a teaching machine designed to maximize
perception and to make everyday learning a proc-
ess of discovery. Application of this knowledge
would be the equivalent of a thermostat controlling
room temperature. It would seem only reasonable
to extend such controls to all the sensory thresh-
olds of our being. We have no reason to be grate-
ful to those who juggle these thresholds in the
name of haphazard innovation.
An astronomer looking through a 200-inch tele-
scope exclaimed that it was going to rain. His
assistant asked, "How can you tell?" "Because
my corns hurt."
Environments are not passive wrappings, but are,
rather, active processes which are invisible. The
groundrules, pervasive structure, and over-all pat-
terns of environments elude easy perception. Anti-
environments, or countersituations made by artists,
provide means of direct attention and enable us
to see and understand more clearly. The interplay
between the old and the new environments cre-
ates many problems and confusions. The main
obstacle to a clear understanding of the effects of
the new media is our deeply embedded habit of
regarding all phenomena from a fixed point of
view. We speak, for instance, of "gaining perspec-
tive." This psychological process derives uncon-
sciously from print technology.
Print technology created the public. Electric tech-
nology created the mass. The public consists of
separate individuals walking around with separate,
fixed points of view. The new technology demands
69
that we abandon the luxury of this posture, this
fragmentary outlook.
The method of our time is to use not a single but
multiple models for exploration — the technique of
the suspended judgment is the discovery of the
twentieth century as the technique of invention
was the discovery of the nineteenth.
70
%4f
It isn't that I don't like current events.
There have just been so many of them lately. "
72
The end of the line.
The railway radically altered the personal outlooks
and patterns of social interdependence. It bred
and nurtured the American Dream. It created to-
tally new urban, social, and family worlds. New
ways of work. New ways of management. New
legislation.
The technology of the railway created the myth of a
green pasture world of innocence. It satisfied
man's desire to withdraw from society, symbolized
by the city, to a rural setting where he could
recover his animal and natural self. It was the pas-
toral ideal, a Jeffersonian world, an agrarian de-
mocracy which was intended to serve as a guide
to social policy. It gave us darkest suburbia and
its lasting symbol: the lawnmower.
The circuited city of the future will not be the huge
hunk of concentrated real estate created by the
railway. It will take on a totally new meaning under
conditions of very rapid movement. It will be an
information megalopolis. What remains of the con-
figuration of former "cities" will be very much
like World's Fairs — places in which to show off new
technology, not places of work or residence. They
will be preserved, museumlike, as living monu-
ments to the railway era. If we were to dispose of
the city now, future societies would reconstruct
them, like so-many Williamsburgs.
(to
The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally
new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves
to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past.
We look at the present through a rear-view mirror.
We march backwards into the future. Suburbia
lives imaginatively in Bonanza-land.
When
information
is
brushed
against
information . . .
the results are startling and effective. The peren
nial quest for involvement, fill-in, takes many forms
The stars are so big,
The Earth is so small,
Stay as you are.
en vi ro
Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.
nment
The poet, the artist, the sleuth— whoever sharpens
our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely "well-
adjusted," he cannot go along with currents and
trends. A strange bond often exists among anti-
social types in their power to see environments
as they really are. This need to interface, to con-
front environments with a certain antisocial power,
is manifest in the famous story, "The Emperor's
New Clothes." "Well-adjusted" courtiers, having
vested interests, saw the Emperor as beautifully
appointed. The "antisocial" brat, unaccustomed to
the old environment, clearly saw that the Emperor
"ain't got nothin 1 on." The new environment was
clearly visible to him.
Sneed Martin, Larson E. Whipsnade, Chester
Snavely, A. Pismo Clam, J. P. Pinkerton Snoop-
ington, Mahatma Kane Jeeves-he was always the
man on the flying trapeze. On the stage, on the
silver screen, all through his life, he swung between
the ridiculous and the sublime, using humor as
a probe.
Humor as a system of communications and as a
probe of our environment — of what's really going
on — affords us our most appealing anti-environ-
mental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in imme-
diate experience, and is often the best guide to
changing perceptions. Older societies thrived on
purely literary plots. They demanded story lines.
Today's humor, on the contrary, has no story line-
no sequence. It is usually a compressed overlay
of stories.
amateur
"My education was of the most ordinary descrip-
tion, consisting of little more than the rudiments
of reading, writing, and arithmetic at a common day
school. My hours out of school were passed at
home and in the streets." Michael Faraday, who
had little mathematics and no formal schooling
beyond the primary grades, is celebrated as an
experimenter who discovered the induction of
electricity. He was one of the great founders of
modern physics. It is generally acknowledged that
Faraday's ignorance of mathematics contributed
to his inspiration, that it compelled him to develop
a simple, nonmathematical conceptwhen he looked
for an explanation of his electrical and magnetic
phenomena. Faraday had two qualities that more
than made up for his lack of education: fantastic
intuition and independence and originality of mind.
Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is
anti-environmental. Professionalism merges the
individual into patterns of total environment.
Amateurism seeks the development of the total
awareness of the individual and the critical aware-
ness of the groundrules of society. The amateur
can afford to lose. The professional tends to
classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the
groundrules of the environment. The groundrules
provided by the mass response of his colleagues
serve as a pervasive environment of which he is
contentedly and unaware. The "expert" is the man
who stays put.
"There are children playing in the street who could
solve some of my top problems in physics, because
they have modes of sensory perception that I lost
long ago."
— J. Robert Oppenheimer
Our official culture is striving to force the new
media to do the work of the old.
These are difficult times because we are witness-
ing a clash of cataclysmic proportions between
two great technologies. We approach the new with
the psychological conditioning and sensory re-
sponses of the old. This clash naturally occurs in
transitional periods. In late medieval art, for in-
stance, we saw the fear of the new print technology
expressed in the theme The Dance of Death. To-
day, similar fears are expressed in the Theater of
the Absurd. Both represent a common failure: the
attempt to do a job demanded by the new environ-
ment with the tools of the old.
101)
The youth of today are not permitted to approach
the traditional heritage of mankind through the door
of technological awareness. This only possible door
for them is slammed in their faces by a rear-view-
mirror society.
The young today live mythically and in depth. But
they encounter instruction in situations organized
by means of classified information — subjects are
unrelated, they are visually conceived in terms of
a blueprint. Many of our institutions suppress all
the natural direct experience of youth, who respond
with untaught delight to the poetry and the beauty
of the new technological environment, the environ-
ment of popular culture. It could be their door to
all past achievement if studied as an active (and
not necessarily benign) force.
The student finds no means of involvement for
himself and cannot discover how the educational
scheme relates to his mythic world of electronically
processed data and experience that his clear and
direct responses report.
It is a matter of the greatest urgency that our edu-
cational institutions realize that we now have civil
war among these environments created by media
other than the printed word. The classroom is now
in a vital struggle for survival with the immensely
persuasive "outside" world created by new informa-
tional media. Education must shift from instruction,
from imposing of stencils, to discovery — to probing
and exploration and to the recognition of the lan-
guage of forms.
The young today reject goals. They want roles —
R-O-L-E-S. That is, total involvement. They do not
want fragmented, specialized goals or jobs.
We now experience simultaneously the dropout
and the teach-in. The two forms are correlative.
They belong together. The teach-in represents an
attempt to shift education from instruction to dis-
covery, from brainwashing students to brainwash-
ing instructors. It is a big, dramatic reversal. Viet-
nam, as the content of the teach-in, is a very small
and perhaps misleading Red Herring. It really has
little to do with the teach-in, as such, anymore than
with the dropout.
The dropout represents a rejection of nineteenth-
century technology as manifested in our educa-
tional establishments. The teach-in represents a
creative effort, switching the educational process
from package to discovery. As the audience be-
comes a participant in the total electric drama,
the classroom can become a scene in which the
audience performs an enormous amount of work.
The ear favors no particular "point of view." We
are enveloped by sound. It forms a seamless web
around us. We say, "Music shall fill the air." We
never say, "Music shall fill a particular segment
of the air."
We hear sounds from everywhere, without ever
having to focus. Sounds come from "above," from
"below," from in "front" of us, from "behind" us,
from our "right," from our "left." We can't shut out
sound automatically. We simply are not equipped
with earlids. Where a visual space is an organized
continuum of a uniformed connected kind, the ear
world is a world of simultaneous relationships.
113
"The discovery of the alphabet will create forget-
fulness in the learners' souls, because they will not
use their memories; they will trust to the external
written characters and not remember of them-
selves ... You give your disciples not truth but only
the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many
things, and will have learned nothing; they will
appear to be omniscient and will generally know
nothing."
-Socrates, "Phaedrus"
Homer's "Iliad" was the cultural encyclopedia of
pre-literate Greece, the didactic vehicle that pro-
vided men with guidance for the management of
their spiritual, ethical, and social lives. All the per-
suasive skills of the poetic and the dramatic idiom
were marshaled to insure the faithful transmission
of the tradition from generation to generation.
These Bardic songs were rhythmically organized
with great formal mastery into metrical patterns
which insured that everyone was psychologically
attuned to memorization and to easy recall. There
was no ear illiteracy in pre-literate Greece.
In the "Republic," Plato vigorously attacked the oral,
poetized form as a vehicle for communicating
knowledge. He pleaded for a more precise method
of communication and classification ("The Ideas"),
one which would favor the investigation of facts,
principles of reality, human nature, and conduct.
What the Greeks meant by "poetry" was radically
different from what we mean by poetry. Their
"poetic" expression was a product of a collective
psyche and mind. The mimetic form, a technique
115
that exploited rhythm, meter, and music, achieved
the desired psychological response in the listener.
Listeners could memorize with greater ease what
was sung than what was said. Plato attacked this
method because it discouraged disputation and
argument. It was in his opinion the chief obstacle
to abstract, speculative reasoning— he called it "a
poison, and an enemy of the people."
"Blind," all-hearing Homer inherited this meta-
phorical mode of speech, a speech which, like a
prism, refracts much meaning to a single point.
"Precision" is sacrificed for a greater degree of
suggestion. Myth is the mode of simultaneous
awareness of a complex group of causes and
effects.
Electric circuitry'confers a mythic dimension on our
ordinary individual and group actions. Our tech-
nology forces us to live mythically, but we con-
tinue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate
planes.
Myth means putting on the audience, putting on
one's environment. The Beatles do this. They are a
group of people who suddenly were able to put
on their audience and the English language with
musical effects— putting on a whole vesture, a
whole time, a Zeit.
Young people are looking for a formula for put-
ting on the universe— participation mystique. They
do not look for detached patterns— for ways of re-
lating themselves to the world, a la nineteenth
century.
EDUCATION
Develop A
Powerful
Memory?
A noted publisher in Chicago
reports there is a simple tech-
nique for acquiring a powerful
memory which can pay you real
dividends in both business and
social advancement and works
like magic to give you added
poise, necessary self-confidence
and greater popularity.
According to this publisher,
many people do not realize how
much they could influence others
simply by remembering accurately
everything they see, hear, or read.
Whether in business, at social
functions or even in casual con-
versations with new acquaintances,
there are ways in which you can
dominate each situation by your
ability to remember.
To acquaint the readers of this
paper with the easy-to-follow rules
for developing skill in remember-
ing anything you choose to remem-
ber, the publishers have printed
full details of their self-training
method in a new book, "Adven-
tures in Memory," which will be;
mailed free to anyone who re-
quests it. No obligation. Send your
name, address and zip code to:
Memory Studies, 835 Diversey
Parkway, Dept. 8183, Chicago, 111
60614. A postcard will do.
•Ah fiC '$t &
117
Most people find it difficult to understand purely
verbal concepts. They suspect the ear; they don't
trust it. In general we feel more secure when things
are visible, when we can "see for ourselves." We
admonish children, for instance, to "believe only
half of what they see, and nothing of what they
hear." All kinds of "shorthand" systems of notation
have been developed to help us see what we hear.
We employ visual and spatial metaphors for a great
many everyday expressions. We insist on employ-
ing visual metaphors even when we refer to purely
psychological states, such as tendency and dura-
tion. For instance, we say there after when we really
mean thenafter, always when we mean at all times.
We are so visually biased that we call our wisest
men visionaries, or seers!
Reminders — (relics of the past) — in a world of the
PRINTED word-efforts to introduce an AUDITORY
dimension onto the visual organization of the
PAGE: all effect information, RHYTHM, inflection,
pauses. Until recent years, these EFFECTS were
quite elaborate— they allowed for all sorts of
CHANGES of type faces. The NEWSPAPER lay-
out provides more variety of AUDITORY effects
from typography than the ordinary book page does.
John Cage:
"One must be disinterested, accept that a sound
is a sound and a man is a man, give up illusions
about ideas of order, expressions of sentiment,
and all the rest of our inherited aesthetic claptrap."
The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all.
This puts one in accord with nature, in her man-
ner of operation."
"Everyone is in the best seat."
"Everything we do is music."
Theatre takes place all the time, wherever one
is. And art simply facilitates persuading one this
is the case."
They [I Ching] told me to continue what I was
doing, and to spread
and
revolution.'
120
Listening to the simultaneous messages of Dublin,
James Joyce released the greatest flood of oral
linguistic music that was ever manipulated into art.
"The prouts who will invent a writing there ulti-
mately is the poeta, still more learned, who dis-
covered the raiding there originally. That's the
point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for
now in soandso many counterpoint words. What
can't be coded can be decorded if an ear aye
sieze what no eye ere grieved for. Now, the doc-
trine obtains, we have occasioning cause causing
effects and affects occasionally recausing after-
effects.
Joyce is, in the "Wake," making his own Altamira
cave drawings of the entire history of the human
mind, in terms of its basic gestures and postures
during all the phases of human culture and tech-
nology. As his title indicates, he saw that the
wake of human progress can disappear again into
the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn cycle
of tribal institutions can return in the electric age,
but if again, then let's make it a wake or awake or
both. Joyce could see no advantage in our remain-
ing locked up in each cultural cycle as in atrance or
dream. He discovered the means of living simulta-
neously in all cultural modes while quite conscious.
"Authorship" — in the sense we know it today, indi-
vidual intellectual effort related to the book as an
economic commodity — was practically unknown
before the advent of print technology. Medieval
scholars were indifferent to the precise identity
of the "books" they studied. In turn, they rarely
signed even what was clearly their own. They
were a humble service organization. Procuring
texts was often a very tedious and time-consuming
task. Many small texts were transmitted into vol-
umes of miscellaneous content, very much like
"jottings" in a scrapbook, and, in this transmission,
authorship was often lost.
The invention of printing did away with anonymity,
fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of
considering intellectual effort as private property.
Mechanical multiples of the same text created a
public — a reading public. The rising consumer-
oriented culture became concerned with labels of
authenticity and protection against theft and piracy.
The idea of copyright— "the exclusive right to re-
produce, publish, and sell the matter and form of
a literary or artistic work"— was born.
123
Xerography— every man'sbrain-picker— heraldsthe
times of instant publishing. Anybody can now be-
come both author and publisher. Take any books
on any subject and custom-make your own book
by simply xeroxing a chapter from this one, a
chapter from that one— instant steal!
As new technologies come into play, people are
less and less convinced of the importance of self-
expression. Teamwork succeeds private effort.
A ditto, ditto device.
11 11 ii n
A ditto, ditto device.
H n ii H
A ditto, ditto device.
Even so imaginative a writer as Jules Verne failed
to envisage the speed with which electric tech-
nology would produce informational media. He
rashly predicted that television would be invented
in the XXIXth Century.
Science-fiction writing today presents situations
that enable us to perceive the potential of new
technologies. Formerly, the problem was to in-
vent new forms of labor-saving. Today, the reverse
is the problem. Now we have to adjust, not to in-
vent. We have to find the environments in which
it will be possible to live with our new inventions.
Big Business has learned to tap the s-f writer.
AU XXIX" SIECLE
125
Television completes the cycle of the human sen-
sorium. With the omnipresent ear and the moving
eye, we have abolished writing, the specialized
acoustic-visual metaphor that established the dy-
namics of Western civilization.
In television there occurs an extension of the sense
of active, exploratory touch which involves all the
senses simultaneously, rather than that of sight
alone. You have to be "with" it. But in all electric
phenomena, the visual is only one component in
a complex interplay. Since, in the age of informa-
tion, most transactions are managed electrically,
the electric technology has meant for Western
man a considerable drop in the visual component,
in his experience, and a corresponding increase
in the activity of his other senses.
Television demands participation and involvement
in depth of the whole being. It will not work as a
background. It engages you. Perhaps this is why
so many people feel that their identity has been
threatened. This charge of the light brigade has
heightened our general awareness of the shape
and meaning of lives and events to a level of ex-
treme sensitivity.
It was the funeral of President Kennedy that most
strongly proved the power of television to invest
an occasion with the character of corporate par-
ticipation. It involves an entire population in a ritual
process. (By comparison, press, movies, and radio
are mere packaging devices for consumers.) In
television, images are projected at you. You are
the screen. The images wrap around you. You are
the vanishing point. This creates a sort of inward-
ness, a sort of reverse perspective which has much
in common with Oriental art.
The television generation is a grim bunch. It is
much more seriousthan children of any otherperiod
— when they were frivolous, more whimsical. The
television child is more earnest, more dedicated.
Most often the few seconds sandwiched between
the hours of viewing — the "commercials" — reflect a
truer understanding of the medium. There simply
is no time for the narrative form, borrowed from
earlier print technology. The story line must be
abandoned. Up until very recently, television com-
mercials were regarded as simply a bastard form,
or vulgar folk art. They are influencing contem-
porary literature. Vide "In Cold Blood, "forinstance.
128
The main cause for disappointment in and for
criticism of television is the failure on the part of
its critics to view it as a totally new technology
which demands different sensory responses. These
critics insist on regarding television as merely a
degraded form of print technology. Critics of tele-
vision have failed to realize that the motion pic-
tures they are lionizing— such as "The Knack,"
"Hard Day's Night," "What's New Pussycat?"-
would prove unacceptable as mass audience films
if the audience had not been preconditioned by
television commercials to abrupt zooms, elliptical
editing, no story lines, flash cuts.
" When you consider television's awesome power
to educate, aren't you thankful it doesn't?"
Drawing by Donald Reilly ; © 1965 The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.
SUSPCNSC » EXCITEMENT *
SAN MAY WARD VftACK STUtf
AMD" DAMN THE DEFIANT
131
Movies are better than ever!
Hollywood is often a fomenter of anti-colonialist
revolutions.
from
the show business paper:
"Ice Boxes Sabotage Colonialism"
Sukarno: "The motion picture industry has pro-
vided a window on the world, and the colonized
nations have looked through that window and have
seen the things of which they have been deprived.
It is perhaps not generally realized that a refrigera-
tor can be a revolutionary symbol — to a people
who have no refrigerators. A motor car owned by a
worker in one country can be a symbol of revolt
to a people deprived of even the necessities of
life... [Hollywood] helped to build up the sense
of deprivation of man's birthright, and that sense
of deprivation has played a large part in the na-
tional revolutions of postwar Asia."
you
can
get away
The Balinese say:
"We have no art.
We do everything
as well as we can."
Museum curator:
"I wouldn't be seen dead
with a living work of art."
A. K. Coomaraswamy:
"We are proud of our
museums where we
display a way of living
that we have
made impossible."
The Establishment pays
homage to four anti-
environmental lads.
British Prime Minister
Wilson visits the Cavern
Club in Liverpool where
the Beatles got their
start. The museum has
become a storehouse of
human values, a cultural
bloodbank.
Real, total war has become information war. It is
being fought by subtle electric informational media
— under cold conditions, and constantly. The cold
war is the real war front — a surround — involving
everybody — all the time — everywhere. Whenever
hot wars are necessary these days, we conduct
them in the backyards of the world with the old
technologies. These wars are happenings, tragic
games. It is no longer convenient, or suitable, to
use the latest technologies for fighting our wars,
because the latest technologies have rendered
war meaningless. The hydrogen bomb is history's
exclamation point. It ends an age-long sentence of
manifest violence!
some
like
it
hot,
138
some
like
it
cold.
Lights, camera, no action.
Hollywood is host to
Premier Khrushchev.
142
The environment as a processor of information is
propaganda. Propaganda ends where dialogue
begins. You must talk to the media, not to the pro-
grammer. To talk to the programmer is like com-
plaining to a hot dog vendor at a ballpark about
how badly your favorite team is playing.
" 'See Dick. See Dick protest. Protest, Dick! Protest!'
146
The Newtonian God — the God who made a clock-
like universe, wound it, and withdrew — died a long
time ago. This is what Nietzsche meant and this
is the God who is being observed.
Anyone who is looking around for a simulated
icon of the deity in Newtonian guise might well
be disappointed. The phrase "God is dead" ap-
plies aptly, correctly, validly to the Newtonian
universe which is dead. The groundrule of that
universe, upon which so much of our Western
world is built, has dissolved.
"Only the hand that erases can write the true thing."
— Meister Eckhardt
"All the News
That's Fit to Print"
V"L. CXV .... No. 39J72.
Stye itork Shue*<
LATE CITY EDITION
s>:\\ \itRK. wki>\im: novfmbfk in. I%5.
'Otra? FAILURE SIARLS NORTHEAST;
00,000 ARE CAUGH7 IN SUBWA YS HERE;
IUTOS TIED UP, CI1Y GROPES IN DARK
To Our Readers
liecause of the power blackout, the mechanical
facilities of The New York Times were put out of j
^perUum last ruglil and early today. Through the
o.'frrteay of The Newark Evening News this issue of j
The Times was set into type and printed in The i
Evening News's plant from The Times's own news
reports. The financial tables are those of The Even- t
•fig News.
olinson Restates
Goals in Vietnam
1/ -r* Aivx.19**!
li'HNSUN CITY Tex.. Sox. i*— President Johnson
* -related broad American goals Hi Viet Nam and
"tli-i'iied Nov. 28 as "a dav of dedication and prayer"
Spreads In to 9 States
HUMMI in llit* Yitionnl Guard and
IM OffDuly Policemen Are
Called to Sen ice in _\eu York
By I'KTFR Kills*
Thi- largest ftmwt failure in Juvti.ry blacked Mit
ne;iriy n]l t4 New York C'fty. parts nf nine Northeastern
tf«tff» and t\ut province* M southeastern Canada la-t
tiiKlit- Siinie SO. 000 square miles, in winch perhaps 2a
million people Ine and v*i»rk. were affected.
h w;i.- more th.m three h»ur* before the fir-t lights
came back on in any part of ihe \t-w York City area.
When they came on in Nassau and SufMk Counties at
9 I* M nu>rtn;nk nliin-«. ( ( thf. -ir»:r r,.U, ,L.rl - -
media, by altering the environment,
evoke in us their unique ratios of sense percep-
tions. The extension of any one sense alters the
way we think and act— the way we perceive the
world. Were the Great Blackout of 1965 to have
continued for half a year, there would be no doubt
how electric technology shapes, works over, alters
—massages— every instant of our lives.
"I must have been delirious, for I even sought
amusement in speculating upon the relative veloci-
ties of their several descents toward the foam
In his amusement born of rational detachment of
his own situation, Poe's mariner in "The Descent
into the Maelstrom" staved off disaster by under-
standing the action of the whirlpool. His insight
offers a possible stratagem for understanding our
predicament, our electrically-configured whirl.
154
"I — I hardly know, sir, just at present — at least I
know who I was when I got up this morning, but
I think I must have been changed several times
since then."
48
"You see, Dad, Professor McLuhan says the
environment that man creates becomes his medium
for defining his role in it. The invention of type
created linear, or sequential, thought, separating
thought from action. Now, with TV and folk
singing, thought and action are closer and social
involvement is greater. We again live in a village.
Get it?"
Drawing by Alan Dunn.; © 1966 The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.
Page 1: A trademark is printed on a raw egg yolk by a no-contact,
no-pressure printing technique. Imagine the possibilities to which
this device will give birth !
L59
Front cover: Peter Moore.
1 : Eugene Anthony, for Newsweek.
2-3: United Press International, Inc.
4-5: Peter Moore.
9: Anthony Petrocelli, for ArtCarved.
15-16: Peter Moore.
19-20: The Advertising Council, Inc.
21-22: Photo-Peter Moore.
23-24: The Art Institute of Chicago.
27-31: Peter Moore.
32-33: Peter Moore.
34-35: Peter Moore.
36-37: Peter Moore.
38-39: Peter Moore.
46-47: General Dynamics, Convair Div.
51 : The Pierpont Morgan Library.
52-53: Formerly Kaiser-Friedrich Museum, Berlin.
56-57: Peter Moore.
58-60: Chas Moore, Black Star.
62: Peter Moore.
64-65: Radio Corporation of America.
66-67: N. R. Farbman, for Time, Inc.
70: Robert J. Day.
71 , 73: Photo— David Plowden; Painting-
New York Public Library.
74-75: Photo-Peter Moore.
77: Peter Moore.
78: Tony Rollo, for Newsweek.
79: Bernard Gotfryd, for Newsweek.
80-81: United Press International, Inc.
82-83: Otto C. Prinz.
86-87: Otto C. Prinz.
89: William Woodman.
90: Photo-Peter Moore.
91: Photo-Culver Pictures.
93: Culver Pictures.
94-95: Janus Films.
96: Ute Klophaus.
97: Joseph Stanley.
98-99: Peter Moore.
101 : Culver Pictures.
102-103: Wide World Photos, Inc.
104-106: Jerrold N. Schatzberg, for Columbia Records.
105: © 1965 by M. Witmark &. Sons.
Used by Permission.
108-109: Steve Schapiro.
112: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — Pierce Fund;
Glyptotheque NY Carlsberg.
115: Memory Studies.
116: Peter Moore.
118: Bell Telephone Laboratories.
119: Harvey Gross— Creative Images.
121: Photos-Peter Moore.
124: "Hieret Demain," published by J. Hetzel, Paris,
1910 ©. Selection title: "Au XXIX Siecle;
La Journee d'un Journaliste Americain en 2889."
par Jules Verne— Coll. Claude Kagan.
126-127: United Press International, Inc.
129-130: Chas Moore, for Black Star.
131: Variety.
133-136: Tiofoto Bildbyra.
137: United Press International, Inc.
139: CBS News.
142: MortGerberg.
143-1 45: Wide World Photos, Inc.
146: Division of Radio, Television and Audio-Visuals,
United Presbyterian Church in the United States
of America.
148-149: © 1965, by The New York Times Co.
Reprinted by permission.
150-151: United California Bank, Los Angeles,
California.
160: Wide World Photos, Inc.
Back cover: Yousuf Karsh
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