McLuhan for Beginners-- Gordon, W. Terrence_ McLuhan, Marshall_ Willmarth, Susan

FOR

BtGINNLRS

BY

w. TERRENCE GORDON

ILLUSTRATIONS BY SUSAN

WILLMARTH

For Beginners LLC 155 Main Street, Suite 211 Danbury, CT 06810 USA www.forbeginnersbooks.com

Text: © 2012 W. Terrence Gordon Illustrations: © 2012 Susan Willmarth All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher. A For Beginners® Documentary Comic Book Copyright © 2012 Cataloging-in-Publication information is available from the Library of Congress. eISBN: 978-1-939994-16-5 For Beginners® and Beginners Documentary Comic Books® are published by For Beginners LLC. v3.1

"Archim.e des once said, . 'Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.' Today he would have pointed to our electric media and said, 'I will stand on your eyes, your ears, your nerves, and your brain, and the world will move in any tempo or pattern I choose'" -Marshall Mcluhan Understanding Media, page 68.

Marshall McWH01 .................. ~ ···········································1 What Is So Special About Marshall McLuhan? .......... 2 McLuhan'5 Point Of View .................................................. 11 Stepping Into McLuhan's Bio ........................................15 lnfluences ............................................................................. 18 Student & Teacher .......................................................... 23 THE MECHANICAL BRIDE ..............................................25 EXPLORATIONS & Idea Consultants ...........................26 Exploring THE GUTENBERG GALAXY ........................ 28 Understanding UNDERSTANDING MEDIA ................ 34 (Re) Defining Media ...........................................................42 (Re)Defining Message .....................................................44 Medium= Message .........................................................45 Media Gains & Losses ................................................... 48 Classifying Media: Hot & Cool ...................................... 50 Station Break ...................................................................64 Amputations ..................................................................... 66 Sense Ratios .....................................................................59 The Microphone At Mass .............................................. 62 Rubbing Media Together .................................:.............. 63 Medium + Medium = Message .....................................64 It's A Triple Play! ...............................................................67 The Alphabet ............ ......................................................... 68 Media Metaphors ..............................................................71 The Money Is The Metaphor ..........................................74 The Key To The Car ...........................................................76 Art For Our Sake ..............................................................78 Electronic Pentecost ........................................................81 Comparing Med ia ............................................................. 84 McLuhan On Television ....................................................85 Mosaic Man And "AII-At-Onceness" .......................... 87 Connecting The Dots .......... .............................................93 TV As Teaching Tool ......................................................... 98 McLuhan On Advertising ............................................... 99

CULTURE IS OUR BUSINESS = Business Is Our Culture ...............................................101 The Global Village ..........................................................103 FROM CLICHE TO ARCHETYPE ....................................107 Cliches & Probes ................................................................ 111 Archetypes .........................................................................113 THE MECHANICAL BRIDE: Comic Strips ...................114 Kroker's PANIC ENCYCLOPEDIA ...................................118 Panic Art ............................................................................. 119 Panic Ads .............. ............................................................ 120 Closure: THE LAWS OF MEDIA ...................................122 The Four Laws .................................................................. 123 Extension ........................................................................... 124 Obsolescence .................................................................... 125 Retrieval ...................................................... ......................126 Reversal ..............................................................................127 Media Tetrads ................................................................. 128 A Tetrad Sampler............................................................. 131 Wrapping It Up ...............................................................133 "What haven't you noticed lately?" ........... ........ ........ 136

6ibliography ....................................................................139 lndex .................................................................................145 v

The author gratefu lly acknowledges the help of the following people: Eric McLuhan Arthur Kraker Greg Skinner John Barry Lee Robertson Jane Williamson

and Tim, isn't this a surprise, after all these years?

f yol! are like niOst people, You've proBably heard of Marshal/ McLuhan-the man .· Playboy rnagazit1e called "the High Priest of Fbpcult" and the ."Metaphysician of Media"and You probably even recognize couple of the phrases he . carne up With-·:the medium is the rnessaqe" arid "the global . vil!age"..c_but thilt's about it. Notanty have You never read any Of McLuhan's books, you've probably never read anything that makes you. think You

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should.

I have news for you: Mcluhan may be the most underrated thinker of our time. But don't take my word for it. Here's what others have said:

" ... [Mcluhan's] theory of communication offers nothing less than an explanation of all human culture, past, present and future. And he excites large . " pass1ons.

" ... th e new environment that Mcluhan discerns should be studied as carefully as the 0 2 system in the Apollo spaceship. Just possibly, understanding Mcluhan may help ensure that earth's environment sustains rather than destroys the crew."

"Mcluhan is a synthesizer. He has gathered amorphous and scattered ideas, thought them through with force and vivacity, and opened up new areas of awareness."

"Suppose he is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov... what if he is right?"

McLuhan was an obscure Canadian professor of English till he published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man in 1964.

The paperback edition became the fastest selling nonfiction book at Harvard and other universities-with no advertising or promotion! Understanding Media was the book that brought Marshall Mcluhan to public attention as a media

demic and popular audiences, engaging in all kinds of debates and forums around the world on his key theme: how technology affects the forms and scale of social organization and individual lives.

analyst and catapulted him to international prominence. For the next fifteen years, Mcluhan lectured passionately to aca5

By 1980, the year Mcluhan died, cable TV had not yet come to the Amazon jungle. The inhabitants of the "global village" he spoke of still

ABOUT NOW?

A few years ago, when Wired, the terminally hip, "futurefriendly," magazine of the computer age was hyperconceived, Marshall Mcluhan was chosen as the magazine's "patron saint." Wired exploded into 1996 by featuring Mcluhan in their January issue. Three articles and a handsome, spare-no-expense cover were supposed to be a tribute to Mcluhan. (His ghost thanks you.) Unfortunately, the Wired articles so drastically misrepresented his teaching that .111~ny readers must have wondered: why bother with Mcluhan?there's nothing to be gained from reading him.

7

ss a sta ing, no one will pay attention; they will p as a point of view.") probably McLuhan's wid ing thought that has his reputation among the surfers and Web-crawlers the 1990s:

the Introduction to MIT Press's thirtiethe of Understanding Media:

"Seldom in living memory had so obscure a scholar descended so abruptly from so remote a garret into the center ring of the celebrity circus, but McLuhan accepted the transformation as if it were nothing out of the ordinary..."

All this, and still Newt Gingrich counted (or discounted) Mcluhan among the lowest of the low, calling him a "countercultural McGovernik "

-HEY, WAS MCLUHAN WAYYYY AHEAD OF HIS TIME, OR WHAT!?!

"McLuhan'sapproach to any question was to refuse to have a fixed viewpoint. For Mcluhan, understanding always requires a multidimensional approach. To fully understand anything, he argued, you have to look at it from several points of view. So, Mcluhan would have gone against his own beliefs and _..------:---~teaching with just a single ~- take on anything. With ?.:.?l~---w-~ ~- no fixed viewpoint, his writings present no complex argument, no thesis developed over a long stretch.

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11

The point is, if we read

The Gutenberg Galaxy unsettling result in The Mechanical Bride was intended. Mcluhan claimed that his work offered a mosaic, or field, approach to the questions he studied, in the same way that the media effects he probed reorganized audiences' perceptions of the world around them (more on "probes" later). In The Gutenberg Galaxy, Mcluhan jolts his readers into an awareness of how books function as a medium (more on this later, too!) 12

or other books by Mcluhan with the discomfitting feeling that we have not read such works before, and ask ourselves what makes Mcluhan's books different, then we get a starting point for some pretty astounding insights into what media and their real messages are all about.

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McLuhan also warned that s~ch reorganiz.~­

tion of perception could be bewildering to those who cling to the older, linear order of . things and a s"i,n,. .gle ''practical" : poin-t: of view.

He cautioned that we should step into his writings the way we step . . into a bath:.

-The exact entry point is of no importance, because a moment later we will be in a new environment-

13

$

o, the organization of a McLuhan book is more like that of a newspaper. Yet, while stepping into a newspaper is inevitable, Mcluhan claimed that stepping back from it, to perceive it as an environment. is u~ indispensable to understanding its power and its ~Sl~ effect. 1"~ a~9f0· . befo1t' __ ...,. ........ __....... .. "0\IP'"II"-'''t:\(.ll'

to be called the &age o& the t1etevision age? 14

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•

Before

he was the subject of an off-Broadway play*, before he played himself in Woody Allen's Annie Hall, before he gave the world eyes and ears for what it is to have eyes and ears in Understanding Media, Marshall Mcluhan was a professor of English who loved James Joyce, ' hated television, denounced "Dagwood," and explained all three. Even though he is the hero of a new generation of cybernauts and Information Highway trekkies, if Mcluhan were alive today, he would probably refuse to have an e-mail address!

BUT HE WOULD WANT TO CONTINUE FIRING OFF IDEAS, MACHINE-GUN STYlE, IN HIS MONDAY NIGHT MEDIA SEMINARS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO'S CENTER FOR CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY. * "The Medium" played to enthusiastic audi-

ences at the New York Theater Workshop in 1993-94 and earned actor To m Nelis an Obie award for his portrayal of Mclu ha n.

15

DON'T PICTURE A SPRAWLING BUNKER OF GLASS AND CONCRETE OR A SOARING TOWER HERETHIS WAS liTERAllY A ONE-HORSE OPERATION: A CONVERTED, TURNOF-THE-CENTURY COACH HOUSE TUCKED AWAY BEHIND AN OLD MANSION ON THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO'S DOWNTOWN CAMPUS.

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McLuhan launched the Center in 1964 but had to j~m n'is 'collaborators and stuaents ·into his tiny office Jor four years before "mov'ing upwto the coach house! At least the

coach-..-~nd ·horse~erl{ ·tong since gone.

And he would want to · continue infuriating a world moving into the twenty-first century with nineteenth century perceptions. And he ·~ would-oh, right, back to the biography...

·. _,

Marshall Mcluhan was born in 1911 in Edmonton, Canada, and raised in Winnipeg. He received his B.A. (1933) and M.A. (1 934) from the Un iversity of Manitoba, earning a second B.A. in English literature from Cambridge University (England) in 1936. The lessons Mcluhan learned during those early days at Cambridge formed the base for his later studies of media. Which brings us to the question: How did a Canadian professor of English become a world-renowned, avantgarde media guru'?

17

By

extending lessons on

language learned from one of his own teachers-namely I. A. Richards, whose lectures Mcluhan attended at Cambridge University in the

CRANE

1930s. Richards pioneered an approach to literary criticism that focused on the meaning of words and how they are used. He deplored the "proper meaning superstition," the belief that word-meanings are fixed and independent of their use, and he forcefully illustrated the power of words to control thought .

• 18

R-ichards argued that thought shou ld bring words under its control by determining meaning from context. This was the key idea of the book he wrote with C. K. Ogden, called The Meaning of Meaning. The idea stayed with Mcluhan right through to his later writings.

"All media are active metaphor& in their power to tramlate experience into new ~onn&. The &poken word wa& the ~ir&t technology by which man wa& able to let go ot hi& environment in order to gra&p it in a new way.,, (Under&tanding Media. p. 57)

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ft'ichards viewed any act of understanding or acquiring knowledge as a matter of interpreting and reinterpreting-a process he called "translation." A key chapter in McLuhan's Understanding Media, titled "Media as Translators," not only picks up this theme but links it to Richards's observations on the multiplicity of sensory channels:

play of the senses, and 'keeping in touch' or 'getting in touch' is a matter of a fruitful meeting of the senses, of sight translated ·into sound and sound into movement, and taste and smell." (p. 60) - "

21

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course, there were many sources of influence on McLuhan's thought besides I. A. Richards, but few that came so early in his career or endured so long. Beyond Richards, the sources of influence on McLuhan were many and varied:

~the

French 6ymboli6t poet6 ob the late 19th century

~the

Iri6h writer ]ame6 joyce

~ the

tngli6h painter and writer Wyndham Lewi6

~Anglo-American

poet and

critic T. S. tliot ~American ~literary

poet tzra Pound

critic F. R. Leavi6

~~~ ·

22

~Canadian

economic hi6torian Harold Inni6.

The richness of McLuhan's thought comes from the unique meshing of all these sources and the "feedforward" (another idea from I. A. Richards) he developed as a method for understanding popular culture and media.

I&»uring his first stint at Cambridge University, McLuhan converted to Roman Catholicism, under the influence of such writers as G. K. Chesterton, and was received into the church in Madison, Wisconsin in 1937. After one year of teaching at the University of Wisconsin, he moved to St. Louis University Though just twenty-five years old when he began his teaching career, McLuhan was shocked to find a "generation gap" between himself and his students. Feeling an urgent need to bridge this gap, he set out to understand what he suspected as its cause-the effect of mass media on American culture. He was on his way to writing his first book-The Mechanical Bride (1951).

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Mcluhan's earliest writings distinguished him as a fine literary critic, but in 1951, when he published The Mechanical Bride and tore a strip off advertis ing, popular culture, and comic strips, his long-standing interest in media became the focus of his books. Dropping his academic prose for a jazzier, more elliptical, and journalistic style, Mcluhan began examining the pop objects of the emerging technological age. Now if you are wondering what the title The Mechanical Bride means, Mcluhan himself summed it up by saying that the book is about the death of sex.

Madison Avenue did, with magazine advertising that gives everything from death to sex the sa me treatment and reduces humans to dreaming robots.

25

•

(}) a muffler attachment for using exhaust fumes to kill lawn rodents in their burrows (}) lawnmower headlights (well, if you don't asphyxiate the little devils, you can take a crack at scaring them to death when they try to get some sleep) fi) 3-D fireplaces (}) airborne gift packages (promotional samples to be released by balloon)

Slightly better ideas that just never made it:

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solve the lift-and-check problem)

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aluminum soft drink containers cartons for alcoholic beverages

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electronic garage door openers frozen diet dinners toilet preparations in single-

use disposable foil capsules ''television platters" (videocassettes more than twenty years before they came on the market)

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the Peel-Aid (adhesive bandage on a tape-style dispenser) transparent training potties (to

And a lot of others that were well ahead of their time:

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,., ~

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~:cLuhan's

second book,

The Gutenberg Galaxy, warned anyone who was looking that he was a seriously brilliant and totally unconventional man. Galaxy won him the Canadian GovernorGeneral's Award for nonfiction in 1962 and established his reputation in the Western Hemisphere as a unique thinker.

28

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the mid-fifteenth century, a German gent named Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type. This invention led to another-the printing press.

For Mcluhan this is a Iways the most important question, so let's find out what he had to say.. .

29

®

n the one hand, McLuhan explains, it meant the

end of manuscript culture. But he also argued that the consequences were much more far-reaching than

simply the loss of jobs for scribes and monks. Printing, he points out, led to the mechanization of writing, which led to the promotion of nationalism and national languages, because international Latin did not have enough scope to provide markets for all the printers. .....e numben, the individual readen in such 1MIO&Ii By making books available to f rivde identity and imposed a 1 Rerecl a sense o P new print medium also o had not prevailed unttl then. So, dardlzatton in ~an&uage tiW

level of Ran became measure of literacy. "correct" spelllng and grammar 1

However, rather than diminish the effects of the older technology of writing, Mcluhan suggests, print culture intensified it. Acording to Mcluhan, before the invention of the alphabet, com-

munication among humans involved all the senses simultaneously (speaking being accompanied by gestures and requiring both listening and looking). The immediacy and rich complexity of this type of communication was reduced by the alphabet to an abstract visu-

al code. 30

6

efore writing became widespread, McLuhan claims, humankind lived in acoustic space, the space of the spoken word. This space is boundless, directionless, horizonless, and charged with emotion. Writing transformed space into something bounded, linear, ordered, structured, and rational. The written page, with its edges, margins, and sharply defined lett ers in row after row brought about a new way of thinking about space. Mcluhan claimed that the portable book "was like a hydrogen bomb," from whose aftermath "a whole new environmentth e Gutenberg Galaxy-emerges." His scenario goes something like this:

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"Gutenberg'& invention ot movable type torced man to co

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Then linear thought

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pro~uced ...~ ~

, "... economically... the a&&embly line and indwtrial &ociety,,

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phy&ic& ... the Newto view& ot the uni mechani&m in which it ia po&&ible to phy&ical event in &pace and time,, "... in art, ... per&pective,,

32

There is more-much more-in The Gutenberg Galaxy but it expands into and dovetails with the full bloom of Mcluhan's vision in Understanding Media, so we'll put it on hold till we get there.

I

n this book Mcluhan notes that his objective is not to offer a static theory of human communication but to probe the effects of anything humans use in dealing with the world. "To understand media," he wrote,

If that approach makes academics nervous, it is certainly one that every artist is comfortable with.

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"Most of my work in the ,._,......:...-.- media is like that of a safecracker. In the beginning I don't know what's inside. I just set myself down in front of the problem and begin to work. I grope, I probe, I listen, I test-until the tumblers fall and I'm in." (From the Introduction to Gerald Stearn's Mcluhan Hot and Cool)

T.Re dic~ienary definitien ef a prebe is nany ebject er device "M.sed ~• inves~iga~e an Nnknewn cenfigNratien er cenditien.n

I

cluhan called his way of thinking and investigating "probes" (you know, like the things we shot off into outer space in the '60s and '70s?) Throughout his writings he relies on such probes to gain insight into media and their effects.

To many academics of -/A ·. ,...~ ' \

Mclbuhan's e~a, his cofntcehpt of pro es remams one o e

·,-,~_ .........most irritating aspects of his ' ~

method. Faith in the power of the probe allowed Mcluhan to take stabs .. ~~ . at a. wide range of --... -~ top1cs, from the serious to the ridiculous, without necessarily committing himself to conclusions or testing his hypotheses scientifically-a habit that infuriated his critics and detractors.

35

11

I

TWO PR08/NG" QUESTIONS

uring McLuhan's heyday, people argued for hours about what he really meant. In Woody Allen's charming film "Annie Hall," Woody and Diane Keaton were standing in a movie line, when a nerd ahead of them started spouting off about what McLuhan really meant, McLuhanwho just happened to be standing nearbybegan to explain himself. (Actually, to misquote himself.) One of McLuhan's favorite retorts to hecklers was "You th ink my fallacy is all wrong?" But in the film, McLuhan's "probing" question was ch anged into a statement: "You mean my fallacy is all wrong." QUESTION: Why do you think McLuhan was displeased with the change he was asked to 111ake in the for111 of this quip in his ca111eo as hi111self in 11 Annie Hall"? Answer: In the film , Mcluhan's question is turned into a statement and is no longer a disabling tactic against an aggressive opponent. As a question, it forces an opponent to stop and think, because it is unexpected-a probe! As a statement, it loses this force and undermines the authority that Mcluhan represents in the scene.

Canadian artist Alan Flint shapes words out of wood, brick, cardboard, plastic, plaster, etc. In a field he dug out the word WOUND in giant letters to symbolize the effect of human systems on the earth. QUESTION: Is this an exa111ple of the 111ediu111 lleing the 111essage? Answer: Yes. For Mcluhan, language is technology and words are artifacts. Flint's WOUND is part of the technology of language executed in a way that reminds us that the technology of digging wounds the earth. Flint weds his words to different technologies but in every case reminds us of the link between the word's meaning and the technology used in spelling it out. He also reminds us that words are artifacts and forces us to reAect on the medium and the message by forcing them together in new ways. (This is an example of an artist making probes out of cliches, a process that is explained in detail on page 107.) 36

1

And, boy, did he ever! Wired

notes that while Mcluhan was a -~~ . political conservative and a devout Catholic, "his pronouncements on current events always add an element of loony dispassion and professional absent-mindedness" (January 1996, p.125) Mcluhan was, to say the least, a prolific thinker. The following are just a few of his more clever responses to pop culture phenomena and whatever else snagged the attention of his rapid-fire mind. (We're not quoting him here-just summing up his takes on the

s~u~b~je~c~t--~of_-~t~he~-~d_=a:__y:_)_-:-~~~~:-l1 Time

Ma azine? Intellectual Pablum g . h II the cues for the

spooned ou.t Wit a right reactwn.

Reader's Digest? It

.

with its end/ • stm:ulates curiosity ess emphasis o k' impossible h n ma lng the s rt f appen, cluttering the mind ( of readers a material erwlse feast on reading

w~o :ig~;r;:~a/ i~digestion)

of a greater intellectual challenge.

The twentieth century? The age that moved beyond

-

-

invention to studying process (whether in literature, painting, or science) in isolation from product.

37

King Lear? \he play is a moclel for the transition from the integratetl worltl of roles to the fragmentetl worltl of jo\>s.

~hizophren;

7

tnevitab/e a. Perhaps so . conse an ry lin balance quence of the created b . sen'Y ilteracy. M~

Magazine? mocks the hot

media by replaying them cool

Renaissance ttaly?

U ke a Hollywood assemblage of sets of antiquity.

Panic abo

. ut autorn t• th ct,on that a Jon? It . perp 1s e darn· tury rn tnant ninet etuates ode! f eenth ~~ stand . o rnech . cen= t . ard,zat· an,cat at, on of I on and f a rea

,--------------=~~~---W-ork. Alice in Wonderland?

Dislocated the concepts of time and space as uniform and continuous-concepts that. had prevailed since the Renaissance.

The city? . · A collective extension of our skins.

38

ragmen-

.

rs?

\hey wear their they take off audience when \he audience their clothes. ·ronment new env1 creates a . for the stripper. (new clothmg)

Stnppe ·

The car following the horse? The car displaced the horse as transportation, but the horse made a comeback in the domain of entertainment and sport. Now that the car has been displaced by the jet, the car is taking on a new ~_1_----------=--::---l role as art and costume. The Journal of Irreproducible . Results? It satirizes the specialist knowledge that belongs to the Gutenberg age. 40

rd Keynes.?

John Mayna onomist \he great ec . to . d to take m nsefalle t the co accoun hift of the s quences hardfrom m( :;t:eZerves) to ware g ttware monetary so (credit).

The internal combustio~ engine? It was the engme of change that integrated the society of whites a nd blacks in the U. S. South when private cars and trucks became availa ble.

BUT HOLD IT, WE'RE PlJTTING THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE (SOMETHING MCLliHAN HAD NO PROBLEM WITH, BY THE WAYJ, SO LET'S GET BACK TO MCLliHAN ON MEDIA AND THEIR EFFECTS.

41

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hen McLuhan first came to the attention of the general public in the 1960s, many ,. ,.."\ assumed that he was promoting the 1c":( end of book culture and embracing the age of television. In fact, he --------:~"-7l was cautioning that the thennew medium of television had enormous power. Publicly, he called it "the timid giant" and urged awareness of that power. PRIVATELY, HIS AVERSION TO THE TUBE WAS SO STRONG THAT HE PLEADED WITH HIS SON ERIC NOT TO lfT THE GRANDCHILDREN WATCH TV!!

Lewis Lapham says that McLuhan's thinking about media begins with two premises: on the one hand, he notes, McLuhan argued that "we become what we behold;" on the other, he stated that "we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." McLuhan saw media as makehappen rather than make-aware agents, as systems more similar in nature to roads and canal.s than to objects of art or models of behavior.

42

Most of us think of media (one "medium;" two or more "media") as sources that bring us news or information-namely the press, radio, and television. But McLuhan had his own ingeniously original definition of media. To him, a medium-while it may often be a new technologyis any extension of our bodies, minds, or beings...

-clothing i& an exten&ion o~ &kin-

-the computer extend& our central nervou& &y&tem-

43

I

y saying "the medium is the message" . Mcluhan forces us to re-examine what we understand by both "medium" and "message." · We have just seen how he stretched the meaning of "medium" beyond our usual understanding of the word. He does this for "message" too. If we define "message" simply as the idea of "content" or "information," Mcluhan believes, we miss one of the most important features of media: their power to change the course and functioning of human relations and activities. So, Mcluhan redefines the "message'-' of a medium as any change in scale, pace, or pattern that a medium causes in societies or cultures.

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This yields the equation:

MEDIUM MESSAGE I

nother reason for this new definition is that "content" turns out to be an illusion, or at least a mask for how media interact. They work in pairs; one medium "contains" another (and that one can contain another, and so on). The telegraph, for example, contains the printed word, which contains writing, which contains speech. So, the contained medium becomes the message of the containing one! Now because we don't usually notice this kind of interaction of media, and because the effects of it are so powerful on us, any message, in the ORDINARY sense of "content" or "information" is far less important than the medium itself. 45

Aha!-you ask-are there no exceptions to media working in pairs? McLuhan points out two:

I. Speech

46

Speech is the content of writing, but what is the content of speech? McLuhan's answer: Speech contains thought, but here the chain of media ends. Thought is non-verbal and pure process. A second pure process or messagefree med ium is:

II. The eLectric Light

Why doe& it &tand alone? Mcluhan's answer: Artificial light permits activities that could not be conducted in the dark. These activities can be thought of as the "content" of the light, but light itself contains no other medium. Whether message-containing or message-free, all of the above examples reinforce Mcluhan's point that media change the form of human relations and activities. They also reinforce his point about the importance of studying media:

fij Wemust substitute an interest in the media for the previous interest in subjects. ihis is the logical answer to the fact; that the media have substituted themselves for the older world. Counterb/ast, p. 135.

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I

cluhan saw that media are powerful agents of change that affect how we experience the world, interact with each other, and use our physical senses-the same senses that media themselves

extend. He stressed that media must be studied for their effects, not their content, because their interaction obscures these effects and deprives us of the power to keep media under our control.

The technology of the age of acoustic space, the technology that later gave writing, print, and telegraph, was speech.

~~~;___--..;.;..,;;,_ ~--~ --~- Transformed into

writing, speech LOST the quality it had in the age of acoustic space. It ACQUIRED a powerful visual bias, with effects spilling over into social and cultural organization-and these are still with us today in the electronic age. 48

Jbut th=.¢·r=.¢· wa8 al8® a JJE~{o:N~ ~L/O:JJJJ=

separated speech from the other physical senses.

~-writing

Later, the powerful extension of speech permitted by the development of rad io

_rr®duc=.¢·d a third -L/0:$$:

-speech was reduced to one sense-the auditory aural. -RADIO IS NOT SPEECH (BECAUSE WE ONLY liSTEN), BUT IT CREATES THE IllUSION, liKE WRITING, OF CONTAINING SPEECH-

So the final score here is one gain and three losses. but we think of the invention of radio as if it were a net gainl

49

cluhan's basic classification of media as either "hot" or "cool" hinges on special senses of the words "definition" and "information"-and on our physical senses more than wordsenses. Mcluhan borrows from the technical language of television to make his point about definition. It's a two-part tale.

f~-rt ~p;i\:t: r:::TY~P~ OG RA~PH~YIS~A~RC;::: HITE~CTU ;;::::R::::::E,A=NDT~ TYPOGRAPH ~R

IS THE A RC H ITECT. THE BUIL.D

TYPOGRAPHY ISARCHITECTURE. AN TH E TYPOGRAPHER IS THE A RC H ITECT. TH

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..fcl\t" 111it( .

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