Marshall McLuhan:
Is It Natural That One Medium Should Appropriate and Exploit Another?
Why have the effects of media, whether
speech, writing, photography or radio, been overlooked by social
observers through the past 3500 years of the Western world? The
answer to that question, we shall see, is in the power of the
media themselves to impose their own assumptions upon our modes
of perception.
Our media have always constituted the parameters
and the framework for the objectives of our Western world. But
the assumptions and parameters projected by the structures of
the media on and through our sensibilities have long constituted
the overall patterns of private and group association in the West.
The same structur ing of the forms of human association by various
media is also true of the non-Western world, and of the
lives of pre-literate and archaic man as well. The difference
is that in the West our media technologies from script to print,
and from Gutenberg to Marconi, have been highly specialized. Specialism
creates not stability and equilibrium, but change and trauma,
as one segment of experience usurps and overlays the others in
aggressive, brawling sequence and cycle.
All that ends now in the electronic age, whose media substitute
all-at-onceness for one-thing-at-a-timeness. The movement of
information at approximately the speed of light has become by far the
largest industry of the world. The consumption of this information
has become correspondingly the largest consumer function in the world.
The globe has become on one hand a community of learning, and at the
same time, with regard to the tightness of its interrelationships, the
globe has become a tiny village. Patterns of human association based
on slower media have become overnight not only irrelevant and
obsolete, but a threat to continued existence and to sanity. In these
circumstances understanding media must mean the understanding of the
effects of media. The objectives of new media have tended,
fatally, to be set in terms of the parameters and frames of older
media. All media testing has been done within the parameters of older
media -- especially of speech and print.
Today in top-management study and planning, assumptions and
objectives are recognized to be distinct entities. Let me quote from a
Westinghouse "Long Range Planning" brief of August 3,
1960:
Now it is imperative that whenever there is a change so that
actual developments do not coincide with your assumptions, you must
change your assumptions and you must change any plans that were based
on the assumption that has now turned out to be erroneous.... It is
absolutely imperative that you must know what your assumptions are,
and that you must recognize that things are not going to develop in
the future in accordance with your assumptions.... Now, the pri mary
difference between an assumption and an objective is that an
assumption pertains to things that are beyond your control, and an
objective pertains to things that are achieved through your own
effort.
What the writer of this brief does not know is that assumptions can
also come within the range of prediction and control just as soon as
it is recognized that the new media of communication in any age, as
they penetrate and transform the older media, are the source of new
assumptions and consequently the causes of change in our
objectives.
The study of media constituents and content can never reveal these
dynamics of media effects. Media study has lagged behind all
other fields in this century, even behind economics, as the following
quotation from W. W. Rostow's The Stages of Economic Growth
(Boston: Cambridge University Press, 1960, page 90) will show:
The argument of this book has been that once man
conceived of his physical envi ronment as subject to knowable,
consistent laws, he began to manipulate it to his economic advantage;
and once it was demonstrated that growth was possible, the
consequences of growth and modernization, notably its military
consequences, unhinged one traditional society after another, pushed
it into the treacherous period of preconditions, from which many, but
not all of the woHd's societies have now emerged into self-sustained
growth through the take-off mechanism.
Media study has not begun to approach the awareness of this
"take-off mechanism" of social change involved in the
shaping and speeding of information for eye and for ear and for touch
and kinetics.
Our project set out to bring media study within the range of the
expanding awareness here indicated by Rostow in economics. My
assumptions, then, were:
- that nothing had yet been done to
bring understanding to the effects of media in patterning human
association,
- that such understanding was quite
possible; media assumptions do not have to remain subliminal,
- that the absence of such understanding
was eloquent testimony to the
power of media to anesthetize those
very modes of awareness in which
they were most operative.
My objectives were:
- to explain the character of a dozen media, illustrating
the dynamic symmetries of their operation on man and society,
- to do this in a syllabus usable in secondary
schools. (Secondary schools were chosen as offering students who
had not in their own lives become aware of any vested interest
in acquired knowledge. They have very great experience of media,
but no habits of observation or critical awareness. Yet they are
the best teachers of media to teachers, who are otherwise unreachable.)
WRITING
- What would be the problems of introducing the
phonetic alphabet today into Japan and China?
- Would the consequences of introducing the phonetic
alphabet into China today be as drastic as when the Romans introduced
the same alphabet to Gaul?
- Will the ideogram survive in some new roles in the same way that
the printed book finds new work to do in the electronic age?
- What are some of the advantages of the ideogram over our alphabet?
- Does a form of writing which involves complex situations at a
single glance favor cultural continuity and stability?
- By contrast, does a form of writing that favors attention to
one-thing-at-atime foster instability and change?
- In other words, is the man of the ear a conservative, and the man
of the eye a liberal?
- Why should writing weaken the human memory? Pre-literate man,
amazed at the efforts of the white man to write down his thoughts and
sayings, asks: "Why do you write; can you not remember?"
- Why should a pre-literate people have no concept of words as
referring to things, but only of words as being things?
- Is the "content" of writing the medium of speech? Is it
possible for any medium to have a content except it be another medium?
- Is the medium the message?
- Is is possible for a mathematical proposition or demonstration to
have content?
PRINT
- Let us try to discover any area of human action or knowledge
unaffected by the forms and pressures of print during the past five
centuries.
- If the forms of print have shaped all the levels of action and
organization in the Western world up until the advent of nuclear
technology, does this explain and justify the type of stress which we
allow to our printed forms in the educational establishment?
- If a nuclear technology is now succeeding the mechanical print
technology of the past five centuries, what problems does such a
transition present to the educator? To the political establishment? To
the legal establishment?
- What would happen to the society that did not recognize or
identify these problems at all?
- What happened to medieval education when it failed to understand
the nature of print?
- Consider why anthropology with its pre-literate concerns should
have so much in common with post-literate and nuclear forms of
communication?
- How did the uniformity and repeatability of the print production
affect human arrangements in time and in space?
- Why should the speeding of information flow for the print reader
create hist~ torical perspective and background? Why should the much
slower informaIvR~> tion flow of the manuscript make such
background impossible?
- Why should the electronic speed of information flow eliminate
historical background in favor of "you are there"?
- Why is homogeneity of space and time arrangement natural under
print conditions of learning?
- Why was it revolutionary for Columbus to assume that he could
keep moving in a straight line, in one direction? Why are there no
straight lines in medieval maps? Why was it unthinkable for them that
space should be continuous and homogeneous?
- Why should the Columbus pursuit of the straight line in
navigation have been necessary in order to discover the round earth?
- Are the flat-earthers on strong ground in terms of our Western
devotion to Euclidean space?
- In garment-making and hence in clothing styles, the straight seam
was impossible before the sewing machine. Trace some of the
implications of the straight line and of mechanism in one or more
other fields of human organization.
- How much is our notion of "content" affected in the
case of printing by the blank page as filled with moveable type?
PRESS
- Does the aspect of newspaper as inclusive image of the community
commit the newspaper to the job of exposing private manipulation of
the communal thing? Is there an inevitable clash between the public
nature and function of a newspaper and the private points of view of
many of the interests in a community?
- Consider the same news story as handled on radio and television,
and in the newspaper. Do you think any one of these ways of handling
the news especially adapted to any particular kind of news? Does world
news, for example, seem most appropriate in headline form? Does local
news fnd its most appropriate form on the radio?
- Which medium -- press, radio, or television -- is most effective
in gaining the participation of the viewer? Does the newspaper reader
tend to be a mere spectator of events? Is the radio listener more
closely involved? Is the television viewer most challenged to
participate in action?
- Does the newspaper typically create the outlook of the sidewalk
superintendent in all community matters?
- Is the job of the newspaper to dramatize the issues within a
community?
- How did the news photograph alter the nature of the newspaper and
the news story?
- How had the print affected the nature of news coverage prior to
the photograph? (See Ivins' Print and Visual Communication.)
- Has the influence of radio and television been to encourage
newspapers to a more editorial attitude to the news? If news can be
given by radio and television, does the newspaper see its unique
advantage to consist in background to the news?
- Why should the newspaper find so little sympathy with historical
perspective on any matter? (See Time magazine as a newspaper
trying to achieve historical perspective.)
- What devices does a newspaper employ to provide a sense of
continuity from day to day for its readership?
- Why should the newspaper, in processing opinion in such ways as
to produce homogeneous emotions and attitudes, be a major means of
mobilizing the manpower resources of a nation?
TELEPHONE
- How would a speed-up of information movement to telephone
dimension affect the pattern of authority and of decision-making?
- Ask your friends and parents how the telephone shapes their
business and social lives.
- What, for example, is the effect of the telephone in medical
practice? In political life?
- What has been the role of the telephone in the newspaper world?
- Consider the way in which the telephone is used in Broadway plays,
or in Hollywood movies, as indication of its real force and character.
- What qualities of drama and action come to mind in relating the
telephone to stage and movie and novel?
- Is it natural that one medium should appropriate and exploit
another?
- Is the use one medium makes of another the clearest testimony to
its nature?
- Why is the telephone so irresistibly intrusive?
- Why do Europeans and especially English people particularly
resent the telephone?
- Why does an Englishman prefer to manage his appointments by
telegraph and postcard rather than person-to-person telephone calls?
- Why is it difficult to exercise delegated authority in a world
supplied with telephones?
- Is the telephone extremely demanding of individual attention?
- Is it abrupt, intrusive, and indifferent to human concerns?
- How does the telephone affect the typewriter? Does it enormously
speed up and increase the role of the typewriter? Check this question
with the book Parkinson's Law by C. Northcote Parkinson.
MOVIES
- In view of the various cultural backgrounds of England, France,
America, Russia, India, and Japan, what qualities would you expect to
appear most in the movies made in these countries?
- In his Film As Art, Rudolph Arnheim for example says that
the American film-maker excels in the single shot; the Russian in
montage. Why should this be?
- Why should the European and the Russian and the Japanese have
regarded the film as an art form from the first? Why should the
English-speaking world have such difficulty in seeing popular forms of
entertainment as art forms whether the movie, the comic strip, or the
common advertisement?
- How did movies sell the American way of life to the backward
countries of the globe? Consider the role of uniformity and
repeatability as indispensable to competition and rivalry. How could
competition thrive where unique expression and achievement are
stressed?
- Was the picture story borrowed from the cartoon world?
- Is there any hook-up between magazine picture stories and silent
movies? If so, is it in the isolation of one emotion at a time?
- Magazines like the Saturday Evening Post have discovered
that idea articles, written like movie scenarios shot by shot, sell
better than short stories. Check the technique of such articles.
RADIO
- What was the effect of the radio on movies? On newspapers? On
magazines? On language? On the concept of time?
- How do P.A. systems relate to radio?
- Does the P.A. system affect the visual as well?
- What changes occurred in radio listening and programming after
television?
- Why is radio so intensely visual in effect?
- What was the relation of radio to the rise of Fascism, politically
and psychologically?
- Why should radio exert such force among the pre-literate and the
semiliterate?
- What was the overall effect of radio among highly literate people?
- Why does the twelve-year-old tend to turn from the television set
to radio?
TELEVISION
- Engineers claim that a thousand-line television
image would provide almost as high definition as the present movie
image. Supposing that an equally high definition of retinal impression
were achieved for television, what would be the effect of its
multi-point mosaic structure over and above the retinal
impression?
- Why should the broken line of the television mosaic
emphasize the sculptural contours of objects?
- Why has sculpture traditionally been spoken of
as the voice of silence? Does this mean that the sculptural object
exists on the frontier between sight and sound?
- Is there any possible line of investigation suggested
by the fact that sound waves become visible on the wings of jet
planes just before they break the sound barrier? Does this suggest
that the various human senses are translatable one into the other
at various intensities?
- If sculpture exists on the frontier between sight
and sound, does this mean that beyond that frontier is writing
and architecture and enclosed or pictorial space? In a word, must
the nuclear age civilize those primitive dimensions from which
we emerged by means of writing and the visual organization of
experience? Can this be done without mere destruction both of
the primitive and of the~iyilized achievement?
Consider the power of any medium to impose its own spatial
assumptions and structures. Extend your observations to discriminate
and distinguish between the kinds of space evoked and constituted by
the film on one hand, television on the other.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Communication, creativity, and growth occur together
or they do not occur at all. New technology creating new basic
assumptions at all levels for all enterprises is wholly destructive if new objectives
are not orchestrated with the new technological motifs.
Dr. James E. Russell, of the National Education Association's
Educational Policies Committee, commenting on my paper "The
New Media and the New Education," felt that I had not included
consideration of the computer's effect:
What I had in mind is the new dimension forced on
education by the existence of computers and teaching machines. This
runs at a much deeper level than the distinction between print and
nonprint communications. It has to do with a new concept of the nature
of thought . . . All rational propositions can be
reduced to binomial terms.
As Tobias Dantzig revealed in his book on Numl~er,
primitive, pre-digital counting was binomial. Post-digital computation
returns to the pre-digital just as post-literate education returns to
the dialogue. However, what the computer means in education is this.
As information movement speeds up, information levels rise in all
areas of mind and society, and the result is that any sublect of
knowledge becomes substitutable for any other subject. That is to say,
any and all curricula are obsolete with regard to subject matter. All
that remains to study are the media themselves, as forms, as
modes ever creating new assumptions and hence new objectives.
This basic change has already occurred in science
and industry. Almost any natural resource has, with the rise in
information levels, become substitutable for any other. In the
order of knowledge this fact has given rise to Operations Research,
in which any kind of problem can be tackled by nonspecialists.
The technique is to work backward from effect or result to cause,
not from cause to effect. This situation resulting from instantaneous
information movement was referred to by A. N. Whitehead in Science
and the Modern World, when he pointed
out that the great discovery of the later nineteenth century was
not the invention of this or that, but the discovery of the technique
of discovery. We can discover anything we decide to discover.
In education this means the end of the one-way
passing along of knowledge to students. For they already live
in a "field" of knowledge
created by new media which, though different in kind, is yet far
richer and more complex than any ever taught via traditional curricula.
The situation is comparable to the difference between the complexity
of a language versus the crudities of traditional grammars used
to bring languages under the rule of written forms. Until we have
mastered the mutuple grammars of the new nonwritten media, we
shall have no curriculum relevant to the new languages of knowledge
and communication which have come into existence via the new media
These new languages are known to most people but their grammars
are not known at all. We have "read" these new languages
in the light of the old. The result has been distortion of their
character and blindness to their meaning and effects.
Non-Euclidean space, and the dissolution of
our entire Western fabric of perception, results from electric
modes of moving information. This revolution involves us willy-nilly
in the study of modes and media as forms that shape and reshape
our perceptions. That is what I have meant all along by saying
the "medium is the message," for the medium determines
the modes of perception and the matrix of assumptions within which
objectives are set.
All of my recommendations, therefore, can be reduced
to this one: Study the modes of the media, in order to hoick all
assumptions out of the subliminal, nonverbal realm for scrutiny
and for prediction and control of human purposes.
Such a program can most readily be instituted today
at the level of secondary education.
[Originally published in McLuhan: Hot and Cool, (ed. George
Stearn), New American Library, Signet Books, New York, 1967;
reprinted in Essential McLuhan, pp. 180-188 (ed. Eric McLuhan
and Frank Zingrone), BasicBooks, New York, 1995]