I want to mention at once my gratification at your kindly reference to me on page 63 of So Much Nearer [A note reads: "This immensely important topic [the principle of complementarity] - publicized recently by Marshall Mcluhan - is discussed at lenght in my "Toward a More Synoptic View" in Speculaitve Instruments"]. Naturally, I owe you an enormous debt since Cambridge days. I also owe a great deal to S[amuel] T[aylor] C[oleridge]. You may know that Dwight Culler in The Imperial Intellect discusses how Newman's Idea of a University derives from Coleridge's idea of an encyclopedia. Bartlett's Remembering, long out of print, makes such a natural introduction to your own work that I wish you could encourage somebody to reissue it with an introduction by yourself. [Sir Frederick Charles Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology]. Using Coleridge's principel that the most effective approach to anyone's knowledge is via his ignorance, would you agree that Plato was quiet unaware of the imperceptible environment of "visual space" created for the first time in humna history by the phonetic alphabet? This concerns your Plato citation on page three. Do you think it indicates that Plato regarded phonetic letters as giving th eye dominance over the other senses for the first time. thus creating a new environment? As the evolutionary process has shifted from biology to technology in the electric age, I am fasicnated by your suggestion (on page three) of the possibility of a non-verbal language of macroscopic gesticulation, an interface of entire cultures. Is it your impression that Red China expects to attain the effects of Western literacy in their educational program? Naturally, the iconic and tactile quality of the Chinese written character keeps the Chinese entirely unacquainted with visual and continuous or connected space. Your wonderful word, "feedforward", suggests to me the principle of the probe, the technique of the "suspended judgement", which has been called the greatest discovery of the 20th century.
I think I made my most exciting discovery while reading Nil by Robert Martin Adams. His inventory of discontinuities and negations in the 19th century revealed to me that the cultures of the world have often been engaged in trying to restrict the continuum of visual space by various strategies of negation, nihilism, discontinuity, etc. Not knowing the properties of visual space, or the spatial properties of any of the other senses, has thus resulted in a huge waste of time and energy. As a result of my brain operaition (I am still on sedatives two years later), several years of reading got rubbed out and I am now re-reading many books including The Silent Language. What a ball! On page 45 of the paperback (about four pages into Chapter 3) you raiss the quesiton of the specific properties of a culture. You would probably tackle it diffeerently today, but you simply omit the approach of indicating the preferred stress on each of the senses as a means of defining a cultural pattern. For example, the whole of Adam's Nil can be stated simply as the efforts of 19th century art and poetry to break out of the dominatn forms of visual space: uniformity, connectedness, and continuity. The position of auditory TV image in visual culture is often absurdly high, as in the importance attached to "music" as a separate package deal. Since writing Through the Vanishing Point with Parker, I have hit upon one means of identifying the cultural bias of any society by its special phrase or phrases for "knowing something throughly and totally." e.g. the American phrase: "I know it inside out" is a puzzler to Englishmen and Europeans. It betokens the supremacy of manipulative and kinesthetic savvy in the Yankee world at least. It woudl probably mean nothing in the South. The Greek word for this is despotein, a sort of aerial perspective. The Englishman says: "I know it like the back of my hand." The Russian says: "I know it like the palm of my hand," the one indicating a visual, the other a tactile bias. The German says: "I know it as if it had given birth to it". The Jap says: "I know it from top of head to end of toes." (I.e. the interval of the MA, or touch and interface.) The Hindu says: "I know it nerve by nerve", and the Thailander says: "I know it like a snake swimming through water", and so on. Such phrases indicate not a single isolated sense, of course, but a mix of senses, with fairly adequate marks of which dominates. They can be used as touchstones, which can be checked out against the rest of the culture very readily. Would it be possible to get a kindof symposium of such observations concerning these phrases, as is attempted by a very large number of languages? Would you be willing to contribute a few yourself? Would not a mere inventory of such phrases be useful? Even without full discussion fo them as marks of a cultural bias in the sensory life? Now that the satellites have enclosed the planet in a man-made environment, "Nature" is no more. Only programming and understanding of the ecological field remains as a human task. Ecology and Echoland are close. Linus Pauling's The Nature of the Chemical Bond stresses the acceptance of physicists and chemists of resonance as the physical bond of the universe, i.e. interfaces but no connections, as in wheel and axel. Yet, scientists remain heavily biased on the visual side oas a result of the unconscious effect of our Western culture. THat bias has ceased with the young since TV, because the TV image is not visual so much as tactile, not convergent or bifocal so much as Cyclopean. Optometrist friends report a mental separation of the activity of one eye in teh young today -- especially in teh well adjusted or viable young. This separation appears to be the result of TV viewing on one hand, and near-point reading distances on teh other. Greetings to Mildy and warm regards.
[McLuhan]At the speed of light there is no sequence. Everything happens at the same instant. That’s acoustic when everything happens at once. There’s no continuity; There’s no connection; There’s no follow through; It’s just all now. And that by the way is the way any sport is. Sports tend to be like that. And in terms of the new lingo of the hemispheres, it’s all right hemisphere. Games are all right hemisphere because they involve the whole man and they are all participatory and they are all uncertain. There’s no continuity. It’s just all a surprise, unexpectedness and total involvement.
[Snyder]Is that okay, do you think?
[McLuhan]The hemisphere thing?
[Snyder]Yes, but I mean the whole thing, all surprise, all spontaneity, no connection, just all at one time. Is that okay for people?
[McLuhan]Well, okay meaning is it good for people?
[Snyder]Yes.
[McLuhan]We live in a world where everything is supposed to be one thing ata time, lineal, connected, logical, and goal oriented. So, obviously for that left hemisphere world, this new right hemisphere dominance is bad. We’re now living in a world which pushes the right hemisphere way up because it’s an all-at-once world. The right hemisphere it’s an all-at-once, simultaneous world. So the right hemisphere, by pushing up into dominance, is making the old left hemisphere world, which is our educational establishment, our political establishment, make it look very foolish.
[Concept: What TV does best]
[Snyder]What do you think is the most ...I want to use the word effective, but that’s not the right word. I’m talking about television here. What has the greatest impact on the audience? Is television best when it covers an event like a space shot or the Olympics or a baseball game? Is it best when it tries to entertain with movies at night, when it tries to inform with news programs that have film of things that have already happened.
[McLuhan]The advantage of coverage of sports events is they are ritualistic. The group gathered there is participating in a ritual. Now the Olympics were even more a group ritual than the ordinary competitive event like a single ball game because they had a corporate meaning. It was not just local. It had a sort of worldwide meaning. This is itself a ritualistic participation in a large process.Television fosters and favors a world of corporate participation in ritualistic programming. That’s what I mean when I say it’s a cool medium. It’s not a hot medium. A hot medium like the newspaper can cover single events with very high intensity. TV is not good at covering single events. It needs a ritual, a rhythm and a pattern. And that’s why a lot of advertising on TV you see is too hot, too specialized, too fragmentary. It doesn’t have that ritualistic flow.But the advertisers are aware of this and they’re doing a lot to correct it. But I think that is the great secret of a thing like the Olympics. People have the feeling of participating as a group in a great meaningful ritual. And it doesn’t much matter who wins. That isn’t the point. I think TV tends to foster that type of pattern in events. Well, you might say it tends to foster patterns rather than events. I was here during the tornado or the…
[Snyder]Hurricane.
[McLuhan]...hurricane and I was amazed at the excitement that it generated in everybody, the expectancy. And it was covered so thoroughly that it dissipated the storm itself. The coverage actually got rid of the storm. I think that is one of the functions of news, to blow up the storm so big that you can dissipate it by coverage. It’s a way of getting rid of the pressure by coverage. But you can actually dissipate a situation by giving it maximal coverage. It’s very disappointing from one angle, but it’s survival from another.It would be a kind of a hangover effect because it’s a very addictive medium and you take it away and people develop all the symptoms of a hangover, very uncomfortable. It was tried, remember? A few years ago they ctually paid people not to watch TV for a few months.
[Snyder]Now don’t you get into alarming people?
[McLuhan]That’s done by rumors not by coverage, but hints, suggestions. But the big coverage merely enables people to get together and enjoy the sort of a group emotion. It’s like being at a ball game, a big group emotion. But I do think that that taught me that one of the mysteries of coverage is it’s a way of releasing tension and pressure.
[Concept: TV is an addictive medium]
[Snyder]What would happen if you could shut off television for 30 days in the entire United States of America?
[McLuhan]It would be a kind of a hangover effect because it’s a very addictive medium and you take it away and people develop all the symptoms of a hangover, very uncomfortable. It was tried, remember? A few years ago they ctually paid people not to watch TV for a few months.
[Snyder]I don’t recall that but I’m sure…
[McLuhan]It was in Gemany. It was in the UK. And they discovered they had all the withdrawal symptoms of drug addicts, very uncomfortable, all the trauma of withdrawal symptoms. TV is a very involving medium and it is a form of inner trip and so people do miss it.
[Snyder]The thought just occurred to me that possibly if you turned off television there would be a lot of people who would say, at the end of the 30 day period, we will not permit you to turn it back on. Do you think that could happen?
[McLuhan]A great many of the teenagers have stopped watching television. They’re saturated. Saturation is a possibility. About the possibility of reneging on any future TV, I doubt it. I doubt that except through saturation. But the TV thing is so demanding and, therefore, so soporific, that it requires an enormous amount of energy to participate in. You don’t have that freedom of detachment.
[Snyder]We’re just talking about basic television programs.
[McLuhan]Yes, but one of the effects of television is to remove people’s private identity. They become corporate peer group people just by watching. They lose interest in being private individuals. And so this is one of the hidden and perhaps insidious effects of television.
[Concept: Charisma]
[Snyder]Have you watched enough of Jimmy Carter during all the primaries to figure out why he has been so effective with his presentations on television?
[McLuhan]Oh, I haven’t seen a great deal. But his charisma is very simply identified. He looks like an awful lot of other people. He looks like an all American boy, like all the American boys that ever were, which is charisma. Charisma means looking a lot of other people. If you just look like yourself, you have no charisma. So Carter has a lot of built in charisma of looking like a lot of other guys, very acceptable guys.
[Snyder]How helpful would you be to Mr. Carter or whomever the Republicans choose, if they were to come to you and say, “you know Mr. McLuhan, we’d like to hire you for a specified fee to advice us on a political campaign?”
[McLuhan]I could tell them when they were hot hotting up the image too much and phasing out that charisma. The temptation of any campaign manager is to hot up the image until it alienates everybody and they don’t realize when they’re doing it.
[Snyder]How do you know when the image is getting too hot?
[McLuhan]Specialized. The moment it begins to specialize and phases out the group.
[Snyder]What do you mean specialize?
[McLuhan]It begins to look more and more like one guy. It begins to look more and more like Jimmy Carter and less and less like the rest of America.
[Snyder]Forgive my impertinence, but has anybody asked you why you are sometimes difficult to understand?
[McLuhan]It’s because I use the right hemisphere when they’re trying to use the left one.
[Snyder]Okay well…
[McLuhan]Simple.
[Snyder]After I get back on one...
[McLuhan]You see, ordinarily, people are trained to try to follow you and to connect everything you say with what they last heard. They’re not prepared to use their wits. They’re only prepared to use the idea they picked the first time and try to connect it to another idea. So,if you’re in a situation that is flexible, where you have to use your wits and perceptions, they can’t follow you. They have preconceptions that phase them out at once. You see, that’s left hemisphere. But I use the right hemisphere a great deal which is a world of perception, no concepts.
[Snyder]Got you, got you, and you don’t try to connect things. You just let the right hemisphere take over and let it go.
[McLuhan]And watch what’s happening. So, that’s the way the cookie crumbles sort of thing, where you don’t know what’s going to happen, but you follow the crumble.
[McManus]Way back in the early fifties you predicted that the world was becoming a global Village.
[McLuhan]We are going back into the bicameral mind that is tribal, collective, without any individual consciousness.
[McManus]But, it seems, Dr. McLuhan, that this tribal world is not friendly.
[McLuhan]No, tribal people, one of their main kinds of sport is butchering each other. It is a full-time sport in tribal societies.
[McManus]But, I had some idea as we got global and tribal we were going to try to -
[McLuhan]The closer you get together, the more you like each other? There is no evidence of that in any situation that we have ever heard of. When people get close together, they get more and more savage and impatient with each other.
[McManus]Why is it? Is it because of the nature of man?
[McLuhan]His tolerance is tested in those narrow circumstances very much. Village people are not that much in love with each other. The global village is a place of a very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.
[McManus]Do you see any pattern of this in, for example the desires of Quebec to separate?
[McLuhan]I should think that they are feeling very abrasive about the English community and about the way the American south felt about the Yankee north a hundred years ago.
[McManus]Is this going to be a pattern right around the world?
[McLuhan]Apparently, separatisms are very frequent all over the globe at the present time. Every country in the world is loaded with regionalistic and nationalistic little groups.
[McManus]But in Quebec for example, like do you define it as the quest for identity?
[Concept: Violence as a quest for identity]
[McLuhan]Yes, all forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live out on the frontier, you have no identity. You are a nobody. Therefore, you get very tough. You have to prove that you are somebody. So you become very violent. Identity is always accompanied by violence. This seems paradoxical to you? Ordinary people find the need for violence as they lose their identities. It is only the threat to people’s identity that makes them violent. Terrorists, hijackers - these are people minus identity. They are determined to make it somehow, to get coverage, to get noticed.
[McManus]And all this is somehow an effect of the electronic age?
[McLuhan]No, but people in all times have been this way. In our time, when things happen very quickly, there’s very little time to adjust to new situations at the speed of light. There is little time to get accustomed to anything. Even radio has sent tribal societies around theglobe up the wall with intensity of feeling. One of the major violence makers of our century has been radio. Hitler was entirely a radio man and a tribal man.
[McManus]Then, what does television do to that tribal man?
[McLuhan]Well, I don’t think Hitler would have lasted long on TV. Like Senator Joe McCarthy, he would have looked foolish. McCarthy was a very hot character and like Nixon, he made a very bad image on television. He was far too hot a character. He would have been much better on radio.
[McManus]The investigations now of the CIA, the FBI and even our own, God forbid, RCMP, has this anything to do with the electronic age?
[McLuhan]Yes, because we now have the means to keep everybody under surveillance. No matter what part of the world they are in, we can put them under surveillance. This has become one of the main occupations of mankind, just watching other people and keeping a record of their goings on.
[McManus]And invading privacy.
[McLuhan]Yes, in fact, just ignoring it. Everybody has become porous. The light and the the message go right through us. At this moment, we are on the air. We do not have any physical body. When you’re on the telephone or on radio or on T.V., you don’t have a physical body - you’re just an image on the air. When you don’t have a physical body, you’re a discarnate being. You have a very different relation to the world around you. I think this has been one of the big effects of the electric age. It has deprived people really of their identity.
[McManus]So that’s what this is doing to me?
[McLuhan]Yes. Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It’s called being mass man. By the way, one of the big parts of the loss of identity is nostalgia. So there are revivals in every phase of life today. Revivals of clothing, of dances, of music, of shows, of everything. We live by the revival. It tells us who we are or were.
[McManus]Do you feel that the fact that you and I have enjoyed the rewards of literacy, that we are more protected against television than a child?
[McLuhan]Yes, I think you get a certain immunity, just as you get a certain immunity from booze by literacy. The literate man can carry his liquor; the tribal man cannot. That is why in the Moslem world or in the native world is booze isimpossible; it is the demon rum. However, literacy also makes us very accessible to ideas and propaganda. The literate man is the natural sucker for propaganda. You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets but you cannot sell him ideas. Therefore, propaganda is our Achilles’ heel. It is our weak point. We will buy anything if it fairly hard sell to it.
[Concept: Media ecology]
[McManus]What now briefly is this thing called media ecology?
[McLuhan]It means arranging various media to help each other so they won’t cancel each other out, to buttress one medium with another. You might say, for example, that radio is a bigger help to literacy than television, but television might be a very wonderful aid to teaching languages. So, you can do some things on some media that you cannot do on others. Therefore, if you watch the whole field, you can prevent this waste that comes by one cancelling out the other.
[McManus]In 15 seconds I have one question for you. How much television do you watch?
[McLuhan]Whenever I get a chance which is not too often.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK-Qu5of8Rg]Marshall McLuhan 1968 - The End of Polite Society
Transcript:
[Concept: The electric age is the dawn of the greatest of all human ages]
[McLuhan]Well, for heaven’s sake, this present time we’re moving into, this electric age, is the dawn of much the greatest of all human ages. There’s nothing to even remotely resemble the scope of human awareness and human –
[Fulford]Now a value judgment.
[McLuhan]No, this is quantity. Most people make their judgments in terms of quality. I’m merely saying, quantitatively, this is by far the greatest human age. What further valuations would you wish to make?
[Fulford]Oh, I thought when you said “greatest” you meant the finest, that is –
[McLuhan]No.
[Mailer]There would be biggest, more admirable than the Renaissance (unclear), or something. Do you mean the biggest or –
[McLuhan]Yes, we are a thousand times greater than the Victorian age –
[Muggeridge]In size but not in quality.
[McLuhan]I don’t know …
[Mailer]There must be some way. Let’s say if there is a God, it’s possible he might measure these affects by how a handful of air seemed to him ... He might take a handful of air and say “Marvellous” and then take another and say “Automobile exhaust.”
[Muggeridge]Contrary to what Marshall has so brilliantly suggested in all his writing, I think there are absolute standards in this thing [called] culture – in art and literature. And that [through] these standards you can measure one age against another. And we happen to have lived – a great misfortune really – we happen to have lived in what amounts to a dark ages.
[McLuhan]We’re a highly integral civilization, and this is what distresses people who belong to he old specialist, disintegrated one. They can’t find a little place for themselves.
[Muggeridge]Are you sure … are you absolutely sure that this is the birth struggle of a new civilization?
[McLuhan]Oh yeah.
[Muggeridge]Are you absolutely sure that it’s not just the break –
[McLuhan]No, the circuit is new.
[Muggeridge]That’s what I think is perhaps the whole difference between North America and Europe, really: over here you do believe that. You do, you do.
[McLuhan]That’s because you have a bigger stake in the old technology.
[Muggeridge]Well, over here you’re inclined to think that all these things thatyou imagine to be of such enormous importance – for instance, this thing we’re doing now on television, because there are a lot of people who goop at television for hours every day – you’re inclined to think that’s an enormously important thing.And I just think it’s a sign of the kind of vacuity that comes when a civilization breaks down – like [the Roman circuses]. If there’d been a Marshall McLuhan then – Caius Marcus McLunicus – he would have written a great book about the circuses, and he’d have said here’s this new civilization.
[McLuhan]No, there was no new technology. Caesar, by the way, educated the Gauls by [means of] wars. The approved Western method of educating backward areas is warfare. Alexander the Great did it that way too, and Napoleon.I was reading a book on the Russian Revolution the other day in which the author explained enthusiastically that the great forward thrust in Russian institutions came from the Napoleonic invasions – and then from the Crimean War. What is happening in Vietnam now is a great educational forward thrust from us on the war front – on the war path.
[Fulford]It’s very pleasant to think of it that way.
[McLuhan]I think it’s horrible – it’s like roast pig, you know, Charles Lamb’s theory of –
[Muggeridge]Yes.
[McLuhan]You want roast pig? Then burn your house down.
[Muggeridge]Yes. I’m a bit inclined to agree with you. But I don’t think it’s done consciously.
[McLuhan]Oh no, we’d never do anything consciously.
[Fulford]Would you say that this North American society is basically optimistic still?
[Muggeridge]Yes, I would.
[Fulford]European is basically pessimistic?
[Muggeridge]In a very general term, and I would – rather sticking my neck out, and Marshall may disagree with me very strongly – say this, that you over here do believe that the environment men create governs their nature and their lives. And I don’t believe in that. I think that this is only a very small part.
[McLuhan]We are of 18th-century origin, and it was precisely at that time that Rousseau suggested the theory that the environment was the great educator.
[Muggeridge]That’s right. And a load of rubbish it was. Absolutely rubbish which has produced the present chaotic state.
[McLuhan]The nature of the teaching machine is now capable of being programmed by human intention.
[Muggeridge]Yes, but you see this in a way, Marshall, that’s just words.
[McLuhan]No.
[Muggeridge]You program it like men program computers. You mean they put in something and –
[McLuhan]Yeah.
[Muggeridge]– then the computer. But you see that’s –
[McLuhan]It’s like programming lighting levels, sound levels, temperature levels –
[Muggeridge]This is my great point that I’m trying to make: that that is not life, that’s a surface thing, you see.
[McLuhan]Oh.
[Muggeridge]And I think that life’s about something more than that.
[McLuhan]It’s like saying, though, isn’t it, that disease is not just a matter of symptoms. On the other hand, if you can get rid of all the symptoms, who cares about what disease you have?
[Muggeridge]Yes, but the simple fact, taking that analogy, is that treating the symptoms does not kill the disease.
[McLuhan]No, but getting rid of the symptoms does.
[Muggeridge]Well, not completely. Very often if you just treat a symptom and get rid of it, you get another one
[Fulford]What do you think of the young people who are in this hippie thing? You’re one of their favorite people. Are they among your favorite people?
[McLuhan]Well, I can’t say that I have given them too much cause for comfort or I haven’t done very much beside just observe what they …or what sort of form that their behaviour seems to indicate is behind their life. And I can see clearly that they are desirous of a very much more rich involvement in social life, and the mere finding of little niches and jobs and so on will not satisfy them.
[Fulford]Aren’t they becoming tribalized the way you say the whole world is, and they’re actually doing it? They even use the word, don’t they?
[McLuhan]I don’t know, but tribal is not a new form exactly. But post-literate tribal is a very different matter from pre-literate tribal. And we’re tribalizing simply by virtue of a much closer family, a sense of the human family.
[Muggeridge]In this part of the world, you are inclined to say now, as Marshall, that 200 years ago printing was invented –
[McLuhan]Five hundred.
[Muggeridge]Five hundred years ago, printing was invented.
[Mailer]Life’s never been the same since then.
[Muggeridge]I don’t agree with that. I think that printing or television, all these things, they affect the surface of man, but the fascination of life to me is the exact opposite – what I find in Socrates and Augustine and St. Paul, all those people who lived before printing –
[McLuhan]But not before writing. By the way, Socrates ... there’s a wonderful book by Eric Havelock called Preface to Plato in which he just mentions in passing that what Socrates’ great contribution was to the dialectic was the ability to say, “Would you mind repeating that please.” This kind of Socratic irony, the Socratic questioning,was a playback.With the coming of writing, the possibility of playback came into human society for the first time. Socrates was very much a product of technology, new technology.
[Muggeridge]But I wouldn’t … Marshall, wouldn’t presume to dispute it. But what I would say is that if you, as far as I’ve been able in a very sort of amateur way to read and think about the various contributions to knowledge which have been produced at different times, the thing that astonishes me about them is the huge area which is the same, which is constant, and how narrow is the area that belongs to particular environmental changes where a civilization is in a very stable or advanced state or where it’s in a chaotic state.You know, there are two questions that you can ask about life, really. You can ask the question “How?” and you can ask the question “Why?” Now I’m passionately interested in the question Why, and I’m not much interested in the question How. But I think you’re enormously interested in the question How.
[Concept: The end of polite society]
[McLuhan]You know the phrase “polite society”? That, when that came in,this historically meant a society that established its values on theword or the behaviour that was capable of inspection, that would bear looking at. And polite society no longer is with us because we no longer live in a visual culture. And so the values of polite society are for the birds.And I’m not free of the nostalgic look back at some of those old values. On the other hand, I can see why they’ve gone down the drain and I can see why new ones are forming right under our noses. I can see why the new ones create such revulsion, total recoil.
Marshall McLuhan 1965 - The Future of Man in the Electric Age
Kermode: In a sense, you have been a historian as you’ve gone about your work. Let’s talk rst a little, if we may, about your book The Guten- berg Galaxy, where you argue that for a long time, without actually understanding it, we’ve been living in a culture in which our whole way of looking at the world has been determined by typography, by the successiveness of print and so on. Would you like to enlarge on that a bit?
McLuhan: Well, I remember I decided to write that book when I came across a piece by the psychiatrist, J.C. Carruthers, on the African mind in health and disease, describing the e ects of the printed word on the African populations – it startled me and decided me to plunge in. We have a better opportunity of seeing our old technologies when they confront other populations elsewhere in the world – the e ects they have on most people are so startling and so sud- den that we have an opportunity to see what happened to us over many centuries.
Kermode: Yes, which we couldn’t see because we’re inside the system.
Yes.
Kermode: Don’t you say that what happened was that we got used to having our information processed as it is in print – that is to say it’s set out successively – whereas at the root of your thoughts, perhaps, there’s the view that we can see the world as an image instanta- neously, but that we’ve chosen, under the pressure of a technolo- gy, to set it out successively like a block of print.
Well, every technology has its own ground rules, as it were. It de- cides all sorts of arrangements in other spheres. The e ect of script and the ability to make inventories and collect data and store da- ta changed many social habits and processes back as early as 3000 BC. However, that’s about as early as scripts began. The e ects of rearranging one’s experience, organizing one’s experience by these new extensions of our powers, are quite unexpected. Per- haps one way of putting it is to say that writing represents a high degree of specializing of our powers.
Kermode: Yes.
Compared to pre-literate societies, there’s a considerable concen- tration on one faculty when you develop a skill like scripting.
Kermode: Well, this is the visual – what you call the visual sense.
Yes, this is a highly specialized stress, compared to anything in or- dinary aural societies. There’ve been many studies made of this in various ways, but in our own Western world the rise of the pho- netic alphabet seems to have had much to do with platonic culture and the ordering of experience in the terms of ideas – classifying of data and experience by ideas.
Kermode: You mean that sight has become the pre-eminent sense, as it was with Plato, and it went on being so in so-called civilized, as op- posed to primitive, societies?
Increasingly so, to the –
Kermode: – and climaxed with the invention of printing –
Printing stepped it up to a considerable pitch, yes.
Kermode: Now, how would you describe the impact of the invention of the printing press? Give us some instances of what happened as a con- sequence of it.
It created – almost overnight it created what we call a national- ism, what in e ect was a public. The old manuscript forms were not su ciently powerful instruments of technology to create pub- lics in the sense that print was able to do – uni ed, homogeneous, reading publics.
Everything that we prize in our Western world in matters of in- dividualism, separatism, and of unique point of view and private judgment – all those factors are highly favored by the printed word, and not really favored by other forms of culture like radio or earlier by the manuscript. But this stepping up of the fragmented, the private, the individual, the private judgment, the point of view, in fact our whole vocabularies, underwent huge change with the arrival of such technology.
Kermode: Now, could I ask you about the technology which, in your view, is superseding it and which is having its own e ect on our lives, com- parable with, though of course entirely di erently in kind to, the Gutenberg technology?
Well, the Gutenberg technology was mechanical to an extreme de- gree. In fact, it originated a good deal of the later mechanical revo- lution assembly-line style and the fragmentation of the operations and functions as the very rationale of industrialization.
Kermode: Yes.
This fragmentation had begun much earlier, after the hunter and the food Gatherers, with Neolithic man. I suppose, in an extreme way, one might say Gutenberg was the last phase of the Neolithic revolution. Gutenberg plus the industrial revolution that followed was a pushing of specialism that came in with the Neolithic man, the agrarian revolution – pushing of specialism all the way, and then suddenly we encountered the electric or electromagnetism, which seems to have a totally di erent principle. It is, some people feel, an extension of our nervous system, not an extension merely of our bodies?
Kermode: Hm.
If the wheel is an extension of feet, and tools of hands and arms, then electromagnetism seems to be in its technological manifes- tations an extension of our nerves and becomes mainly an infor- mation system. It is above all a feedback or looped system. But the peculiarity, you see, after the age of the wheel, you suddenly en- counter the age of the circuit. The wheel pushed to an extreme sud- denly acquires opposite characteristics. This seems to happen with a good many technologies – that if they get pushed to a very dis- tant point, they reverse their characteristics.
Kermode: What difference is the electric technology making to our interest in content in what the medium actually says?
One of the e ects of switching over to circuitry from mechanical moving parts and wheels is an enormous increase in the amount of information that is moving. You cannot cope with vast amounts of information in the old fragmentary classi ed patterns. You tend to go looking for mythic and structural forms in order to manage such complex data, moving at very high speeds, so the electric en- gineers often speak of pattern recognition as a normal need of peo- ple processing data electrically and by computers and so on – a need for pattern recognition. It’s a need which the poets foresaw a century ago in their drive back to mythic forms of organizing ex- perience.
Kermode: Well, here we are, a couple of archaic literate men, Gutenberg men, talking on the television. What is the audience getting from this? Is it listening to what we’re saying, or is it feeling the impact of a new electric medium?
There is a book called Is Anybody Listening? It’s what worries the advertising men a great deal. The idea of feedback, of being in- volved in one’s own participation, in one’s own audience partici- pation, is a natural product of circuitry. Everything under electric conditions is looped. You become folded over into yourself. Your image of yourself changes completely.
Kermode: In the other book, Understanding Media, where you ... use a kind of slogan, I think the expression is the “medium is the message.” Would you like to illuminate that?
I think it is more satisfactory to say that any medium, be it radio or be it wheel, tends to create a completely new human environ- ment.
Kermode: Yeah.
The human environment, as such, tends to have a kind of invisible character about it. The unawareness of the environmental is com- pensated for by the attention to the content of the environment. The environment as merely a set of ground rules and as a kind of overall enveloping force gets very little recognition as a form, ex- cept from the artist. I think our arts, if you look at them in this con- nection, do throw quite a lot of light on environments. The artist is usually engaged in somewhat excitedly explaining to people the character of new environments and new strategies of culture nec- essary to cope with them. Blake is an extreme case of a man who was absolutely panicked by the kind of new environment that he saw forming around him under the auspices of Newton and Locke and industrialism – he thought it was going to smash the unity of the imaginative and sensory life all to bits. But the artist, what he was insisting upon in his own lifetime, became quite a popular and widespread movement later.
Kermode: Can I return to television because here we are, whoever’s listening to us, is also undergoing the impact of television at the moment. On your view, they’re all deceiving themselves insofar as they’re paying attention to what we’re saying, because what’s going on is a medium which is in itself the image that they ought to be concern- ing themselves with.
With the release of diplomatic cables into the public domain one question is never asked. Who owns the rights to these documents? Whether their content is a "threat to the international community" or "truth which needs to be protected" is irrelevant. After all its big show business. Woody Allen's remark that if show business would not be called show business it would be called show show is not missing the point. On day 20 of the wikileaks saga not only the internet is full of articles dissecting the stream of content for a niche audience. Opinion makers representing governments, non-profits, established professions and digital natives invest a lot of attention and thus money in the hope for a return of investment.
Who has to pay for the information thats filling up newspaper colums and TV prime time. Advertisers? Consumers? Taxpayers? Not so long ago a whole industry was rallying against what they saw as an attack on their very existence - Creative Commons. A legal scheme by which a creator can protect his digital work against exploitation with the same ease an experienced carpenter fixes a broken chair. A furious outcry from industry leaders and authors rights societies alike accomplished nothing in the face of the technological revolution set in motion over half a century ago. Anticopyright laws are drafted and make their way through the parliaments and governments of every western country. But drafting a law is by far easier than having the capacities to enforce it. Awareness raising campaigns sponsored by those who saw their business model beeing bypassed by technological change - notably P2P and MPEG - saw teenagers in classrooms beeing "thought" copyright while adviced to report violations made by there parents to local authorities.
Technology made people who consider themselves as law abiding citizens, criminals. It did not feel like a crime to use a free Torrent programme to download the latest movie blockbuster. Did it damage Hollywood's operations? Of course it did. But at the same time the inflationary effect of technological change brought Hollywood's tools into the houses of everyday man. The same technology that destroyed Hollywood enabled it to make it ever more potent. Just think of digital compositing methods employed to generate everything out of a box. Almost over night became a multi million dollar infrastructure available to millions of young mid-class boys and girls around the globe. Whith the shift from hardware to software, which was in many ways a shift from analog to digital devices, a new realm opend up and filled the fast growing space with content. And there is no end to it. More! - screams the prince of the air. More for everybody in 2011.
Lets assume we are all criminals on the matter of copyright infringement. Who has not listened to an mp3 track without owning the CD or downloaded it on Itunes? Or watched a divX rip of a recent blockbuster? How about the wikileaks cables then? After all they are quiet entertaining. The opinion of a diplomat or a secret service agent on current affairs is worth every penny! Just imagine if wikileaks would have released the secret diaries keept by Michael Jackson or Britney Spears. Shocking details of the everyday life of a celebrity and superstar as RSS feed for everybody to see. Would this be of interest for anybody? And what about copyright law of such information? Would Sony or Bertelsmann want the exclusive rights or would they be satisfied with the increasing attention and coverage of their babies by reporters and journalists as wikileaks seems to be? After all, nothing in the cables is really new. And whatever Britney Spears private experiences are, it is unlikely that they differ in kind from others. Whatever is interesting about the cables, it cannot be its content!
Now, we are all criminals on the matter of privacy infringement - the privacy of governments are its secrets. These secrets are not real secrets but the confidential conversations of the US diplomatic service and reveals much about its internal workings. And no doubt over its validity can be cast after monthly investigations by major news organizations (NYT, guardian, der Spiegel, El pais) and their subsequent evaluation. The consequences are really hard to estimate because most of them would have become public anyway. Historian would have used them to shine lights on events then thirty years old. But in the age of instant information they become an art form ready to be exploited for commercial success. Why not create a business model around it? Because the cables contain a danger for our democracy? No entrepreneur sees danger, they only have eyes for opportunities.
So far the cables of embassies caused a lot of media attention world wide. Julian Assange is by now as known as Michael Jackson and is the face associated with an 'distributed organization'. A distributed organization like Wikileaks is not comparable to ordinary kinds of organization. No walls, no buildings, no organizational chart, no hierachie, no paycheck no work-times, no holiday, no pension scheme, no profit, no contracts. Like the Taliban or any other terrorist organization f.e. the mafia, Wikileaks is the antidote to todays establishment. Such a 'distributed organization' can be viewed as an emerging property of the network. Institutions are structured around the efficiency by which they cease to exist. The substantial cost of communication technology provided the selection pressure necessary to shape an institutional setting aiming to keep them at a minimum. Maximizing profit goes hand in hand with reducing redundancies. With global communication costs at zero, distributed organizations held together by common interest have a competitative advantage. Nothing is wrong with assuming that office space is redundant in the age of instant information at zero cost.
But lets step back and observe. The outcry over the major identity theft of the U.S. state department is far from over. As the extension of military force, diplomacy cannot exist without it. But the difference is that information is as potent to lead to war as misinformation is about the very same wars. And most people in most states don't trust the information they get from the government. For them Wikileaks is the revelation and the best revenge they can get. For people who trust their government it is also a threat to their own identity which causes them to call for Julians assassination or take side in a battle which is not their own. But the major financial institutions have chosen to be on the battlefield. With Amazon's decision to take down the Wikileaks website it will suffer the same faith of Bank of America, VISA, Mastercard and Paypal. Money is information. And whoever controls information controls the flow of money. In an information war, everybody becomes a soldier or hostage.
