Book: Understanding Media
Tagline: The Extensions of Man
Author: Marshall McLuhan
Find Online:https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/understanding-media
Date Read: In Progress
During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man— the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media.
In the mechanical age now receding, many actions could be taken without too much concern. Slow movement insured that the reactions were delayed for considerable periods of time. Today the action and the reaction occur almost at the same time. We actually live mythically and integrally, as it were, but we continue to think in the old, fragmented space and time patterns of the pre-electric age.
Western man acquired from the technology of literacy the power to act without reacting.
We acquired the art of carrying out the most dangerous social operations with complete detachment. But our detachment was a posture of noninvolvement.
In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.
Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree.
This is the Age of Anxiety for the reason of the electric implosion that compels commitment and participation, quite regardless of any “point of view.”
The partial and specialized character of the viewpoint, however noble, will not serve at all in the electric age. At the information level the same upset has occurred with the substitution of the inclusive image for the mere viewpoint.
The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns. We are suddenly eager to have things and people declare their beings totally. There is a deep faith to be found in this new attitude — a faith that concerns the ultimate harmony of all being.
Examination of the origin and development of the individual extensions of man should be preceded by a look at some general aspects of the ::media, or extensions of man::, beginning with the never-explained numbness that each extension brings about in the individual and society.
::all media are extensions of man, but not all extensions of man are media - they are technology?::
A story line encompasses a set of events much like a melodic line in music. Melody, the melos modos, “the road round,” is a continuous, connected, and repetitive structure…
The art and poetry of Zen create involvement by means of the interval, not by the connection used in the visually organized Western world. Spectator becomes artist in oriental art because he must supply all the connections.
Slang offers an immediate index to changing perception. Slang is based not on theories but on immediate experience.
…any technology gradually creates a totally new human environment. Environments are not passive wrappings but active processes.
By Plato’s time the written word had created a new environment that had begun to detribalize man.
Previously the Greeks had grown up by benefit of the process of the tribal encyclopedia. They had memorized the poets. The poets provided specific operational wisdom for all the contingencies of life.
::Tribal encyclopedia: a.k.a. Oral History -> a repository of cultural memory preserved and perpetuated by an entire populace::
In order to cope with data at electric speed in typical situations of “information overload,” men resort to the study of configurations…
“The medium is the message” means, in terms of the electronic age, that a totally new environment has been created. The “content” of this new environment is the old mechanized environment of the industrial age.
As our proliferating technologies have created a whole series of new environments, men have become aware of the arts as “anti-environments” or “counter-environments” that provide us with the means of perceiving the environment itself.
We are entering the new age of education that is programmed for discovery rather than instruction. As the means of input increase, so does the need for insight or pattern recognition.
Art as a radar environment takes on the function of indispensable perceptual training rather than the role of a privileged diet for the elite. While the arts as radar feedback provide a dynamic and changing corporate image, their purpose may be not to enable us to change but rather to maintain an even course toward permanent goals, even amidst the most disrupting innovations.
In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium— that is, of any extension of ourselves — result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.
The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the “content” of any medium is always another medium.
::Does any technology with the potential to become a medium only become so when it is used to intentionally communicate symbolically?::
What we are considering here, however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes. For the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.
This fact [that the electric light is apparently always a medium] merely underlines that “the medium is the message” because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.
The content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association. Indeed, it is only too typical that the “content” of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.
::Does it only become a medium when it is used to intentionally convey symbolic meaning? Or the moment it begins to engender change at scale?::
When IBM discovered that it was not in the business of making office equipment or business machines, but that it was in the business of processing information, then it began to navigate with clear vision.
The General Electric Company makes a considerable portion of its profits from electric light bulbs and lighting systems. It has not yet discovered that, quite as much as AT&T, it is in the business of moving information.
#pint
The electric light escapes attention as a communication medium just because it has no “content.” And this makes it an invaluable instance of how people fail to study media at all. For it is not till the electric light is used to spell out some brand name that it is noticed as a medium.
::Once again, does it only become a medium once it is used to intentionally convey symbolic meaning? It always possesses that potential, but until that potential is realized, wouldn't it not count as a medium? I may be misunderstanding what a medium is in McLuhan's eyes.::
Then it is not the light but the “content” (or what is really another medium) that is noticed. The message of the electric light is like the message of electric power in industry, totally radical, pervasive, and decentralized. For electric light and power are separate from their uses, yet they eliminate time and space factors in human association exactly as do radio, telegraph, telephone, and TV, creating involvement in depth.
::Does McLuhan confound technology with media because they’re married to each other? Do I?::
The increasing awareness of the action of media, quite independently of their “content” or programming, was indicated in the annoyed and anonymous stanza:
In modern thought, (if not in fact)Nothing is that doesn’t act,So that is reckoned wisdom whichDescribes the scratch but not the itch.
the latest approach to media study considers not only the “content” but the medium and the cultural matrix within which the particular medium operates.
::McLuhan says that Hans Selye’s Stress of Life theory emphasizes how the medium is socially the message, but this seems incongruent with his previous comparisons of electric power, the electric light, the railroad, and the airplane. Stress of Life is predicated upon living beings that can experience and transmit stress – the rest are mechanical technologies. Granted, those technologies can also experience mechanical stress, or other manifestations of stress, but they’re still not the human equivalent on a chemical level. Why am I stuck on this? They may be parallel enough to justify this comparison.::
The older unawareness of the psychic and social effects of media can be illustrated from almost any of the conventional pronouncements:
“The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.” That is the voice of the current somnambulism.
Suppose we were to say, “Apple pie is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value.”
Or, “The smallpox virus is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value.”
Again, “Firearms are in themselves neither good nor bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.”
That is, if the slugs reach the right people firearms are good. If the TV tube fires the right ammunition at the right people it is good. I am not being perverse. There is simply nothing in the Sarnoff statement that will bear scrutiny, for it ignores the nature of the medium…
::What about meta-levels and laterality?::
That is, if the slugs reach the right people firearms are good.
::What if those slugs are being used to hunt game for food? What if they’re used in self-defense?::
If the TV tube fires the right ammunition at the right people it is good.
::”If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Counterpoint: Not everything that the TV tube fires is ammunition, and if it seems that way, then it’s a matter of perspective.::
…in the true Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form.
::Does wanting to know more about humanity’s evolving tendency to externalize and immortalize what goes on in their minds (or at least focusing on the media produced by that behavior) constitute as Narcissistic navel gazing?::
It has never occurred to General Sarnoff that any technology could do anything but add itself on to what we already are.
::I thought I understood this, but no, I don’t get it.::
And the paradox of mechanization is that although it is itself the cause of maximal growth and change, the principle of mechanization excludes the very possibility of growth or the understanding of change. For mechanization is achieved by fragmentation of any process and by putting the fragmented parts in a series. Yet, as David Hume showed in the eighteenth century, there is no principle of causality in a mere sequence.
::This reminds me of Kuhn’s theory of scientific change, Normal Science vs Revolutionary Science – Godfery-Smith argued that they’re both required. Seems like the same case here, even if McLuhan seems to be against that idea.::
With instant speed the causes of things began to emerge to awareness again, as they had not done with things in sequence and in concatenation accordingly. Instead of asking which came first, the chicken or the egg, it suddenly seemed that a chicken was an egg’s idea for getting more eggs.
::Hence the nervous system analogy. Yep, this part does make sense to me.::
The message of the movie medium is that of transition from linear connections to configurations.
::What about documentaries, home movies, etc? Maybe I’m just not understanding this thoroughly enough.::
In other words, cubism, by giving the inside and outside, the top, bottom, back, and front and the rest, in two dimensions, drops the illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole.
::It’s an infidelious warping though, like what happens when you watch those videos that try to explain higher dimensions using shadows as an example::
Is it not evident that the moment that the sequence yields to the simultaneous, one is in the world of the structure and of configuration?
::This is actually a really good point, though.::
Specialized segments of attention have shifted to total field…
::a.k.a. vistas, a.k.a. big picture::
De Tocqueville, in earlier work on the French Revolution, had explained how it was the printed word that, achieving cultural saturation in the eighteenth century, had homogenized the French nation. Frenchmen were the same kind of people from north to south The typographic principles of uniformity, continuity, and linearity had overlaid the complexities of ancient feudal and oral society.
De Tocqueville’s contrast between England and America is clearly based on the fact of typography and of print culture creating uniformity and continuity. England, he says, has rejected this principle and clung to the dynamic or oral common-law tradition. Hence the discontinuity and unpredictable quality of English culture.
::What Richard refers to as levels and meta-levels, McLuhan broadly seems to refer to as mediums and technology interchangeably.::
The grammar of print cannot help to construe the message of oral and non written culture and institutions.
::Right, because entities at Level 4 and Level 5 are fundamentally incomparable – although they can be bridged/stacked::
The English aristocracy was properly classified as barbarian by Matthew Arnold because its power and status had nothing to do with literacy or with the cultural forms of typography.
::Right, because the aristocracy's communication behavior was lower-level::
De Tocqueville was a highly literate aristocrat who was quite able to be detached from the values and assumptions of typography. That is why he alone understood the grammar of typography.
::Just to be clear, what McLuhan repeatedly refers to as typography is Level 4.::
And it is only on those terms, standing aside from any structure or medium, that its principles and lines of force can be discerned. For any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary (a.k.a. a Narcissus trance).
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster is a dramatic study of the inability of oral and intuitive oriental culture to meet with the rational, visual European patterns of experience.
::Once again comparing the incomparable Level 4 vs Level 5::
Quote from A Passage to India:
“Life went on as usual, but had no consequences, that is to say, sounds did not echo nor thought develop. Everything seemed cut off at its root and therefore infected with illusion.”
The ultimate conflict between sight and sound, between written and oral kinds of perception and organization of existence is upon us.
::This is why the dance of the honeybee, music videos, and interactive articles are all powerful multi-multi-dimensional tools for communication. They don’t try to compare meta-levels or levels, they integrate them into a greater whole. They’re true multi-media.::
Detribalization by literacy and its traumatic effects on tribal man…
::Does tribalization = Level 3? Because it’s based on language at the capabilities level rather than at it is own level? (would it at its own level = resonance?)::
lines of force
::The way McLuhan refers to lines of force, he’s talking about the ramifications of media on a more immediate level::
::Exploration of lines of force over space and time:::
Consider the 3x3 grid:
X A TL
T S F
R N P
Cold Lukewarm Hot
Lukewarm Hot & Cold Lukewarm
Hot Lukewarm Cold
Cold Lukewarm Hot
Cold Lukewarm Hot
Cold Lukewarm Hot
External Bidirectional Internal
External Bidirectional Internal
External Bidirectional Internal
Abstract Abstract Abstract
??? ??? ???
Concrete Concrete Concrete
Submerging natives with floods of concepts for which nothing has prepared them is the normal action of all our technology. But with electric media Western man himself experiences exactly the same inundation as the remote native.
::This is what Richard does to people, he inundates them with concepts for which nothing has probably prepared them, to force them to disintegrate psychologically.::
Mental breakdown of varying degrees is the very common result of uprooting and inundation with new information and endless new patterns of information.
::Considering this is what can lead to (positive) disintegration, this can be a good thing in my eyes if you think Dabrowski's work has merit.::
Ancient prehistoric societies regard violent crime as pathetic.
::Where are the sources this? I'd really like to read more about this.::
The American stake in literacy as a technology or uniformity applied to every level of education, government, industry, and social life is totally threatened by the electric technology.
::So McLuhan regards literacy as the technology, and writing as a medium for it?::
Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot
::I disagree.::
The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.
For the man in a literate and homogenized society ceases to be sensitive to the diverse and discontinuous life of forms.
::In some ways, the way that McLuhan compares the invisible and irresistible effects of media upon those who create it and consume it versus the way people expect to interact with it based upon their opinions and perceptions of it reminds me of the whole Hawthorne Principle comparison to quantum physics, even though the Hawthorne experiments were showed to pretty much be inconclusive at best.::
Print created individualism and nationalism in the sixteenth century. Program and “content” analysis offer no clues to the magic of these media or to their subliminal charge.
::That's a bold statement.::
Subliminal and docile acceptance of media impact has made them prisons without walls for their human users.
That our human senses, of which all media are extensions, are also fixed charges on our personal energies, and that they also configure the awareness and experience of each one of us, may be perceived in another connection mentioned by the psychologist C. G. Jung:
“Every Roman was surrounded by slaves. The slave and his psychology flooded ancient Italy, and every Roman became inwardly, and of course unwittingly, a slave. Because living constantly in the atmosphere of slaves, he became infected through the unconscious with their psychology. No one can shield himself from such an influence (Contributions to Analytical Psychology, London, 1928).”
Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.
Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone.
::Hot media = low in participation or completion by the audience::
::Cool media = high in participation or completion by the audience::
A cool medium like hieroglyphic or ideogrammatic written characters has very different effects from the hot and explosive medium of the phonetic alphabet.
The heavy and unwieldy media, such as stone, are time binders. Used for writing, they are very cool indeed, and serve to unify the ages; whereas paper is a hot medium that serves to unify spaces horizontally, both in political and entertainment empires.
Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than dialogue.
::I’m not sure I agree with this contention, if only because seminars and books no longer come in in-person and physical formats, respectively.::
Intensity or high-definition engenders specialism and fragmentation in living as in entertainment, which explains why any intense experience must be “forgotten,” “censored,” and reduced to a very cool state before it can be “learned” or assimilated.
The Freudian “censor” is less of a moral function than an indispensable condition of learning… The “censor” protects our central system of values, as it does our physical nervous system by simply cooling off the onset of experience a great deal.
For many people, this cooling system brings on a life-long state of psychic rigor mortis, or of somnambulism, particularly observable in periods of new technology.
::(Draught of) Living Death::
Specialist technologies detribalize. The nonspecialist electric technology retribalizes.
::Once again, harkening back to Kuhn’s theory of scientific change.::
For myth is the instant vision of a complex process that ordinarily extends over a long period. Myth is contraction or implosion of any process, and the instant speed of electricity confers the mythic dimension on ordinary industrial and social action today. We live mythically but continue to think fragmentarily and on single planes.
Concern with effect rather than meaning is a basic change of our electric time, for effect involves the total situation, and not a single level of information movement.
::Which implies that meaning involves only a single level of information movement?::
::McLuhan basically seems to think that regression is a good thing? But this isn't this phenomenon is cyclical?::
Whole cultures could now be programmed to keep their emotional climate stable in the same way that we have begun to know something about maintaining equilibrium in the commercial economies of the world.
::This alone is a motivation behind what I’m doing. Wanting to understand and stabilize the emotional climate of entire societies via media.::
In the very sense of a cool medium, Calvin Coolidge was so lacking in any articulation of data in his public image that there was only one word for him. He was real cool. In the hot 1920s, the hot press medium found Cal very cool and rejoiced in his lack of image, since it compelled the participation of the press in filling in an image of him for the public.
The effect of hot media treatment cannot include much empathy or participation at any time.
The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.
Nevertheless, it makes all the difference whether a hot medium is used in a hot or a cool culture. The hot radio medium used in cool or non-literate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment. A cool or low literacy culture cannot accept hot media like movies or radio as entertainment. They are, at least, as radically setting for them as the cool TV medium has proved to be for our high-literacy world.
“Comfort” consists in abandoning a visual arrangement in favor of one that permits casual participation of the senses, a state that is excluded when any one sense, but especially the visual sense, is hotted up to the point of dominant command of a situation.
So the hotting-up of one sense tends to effect hypnosis, and the cooling of all sense tends to result in hallucination.
Both telephone and teleprinter as amplifications of the unconscious cultural bias of Moscow, on one hand, and of Washington, on the other, are invitations to monstrous misunderstandings. The Russian bugs rooms and spies by ear, finding this quite natural. He is outraged by our visual spying, however, finding this quite unnatural.
The principle that during the stages of their development all things appear under forms opposite to those that they finally present is an ancient doctrine. Interest in the power of things to reverse themselves by evolution is evident in a great diversity of observations, sage and jocular.
A caterpillar gazing at the butterfly is supposed to have remarked, “Waal, you’ll never catch me in one of those durn things.”
::Oh look, it me.::
Until recently our institutions and arrangements, social, political, and economic, had shared a one-way pattern. We still think of it as “explosive,” or expansive; and though it no longer obtains, we still talk about the population explosion and the explosion in learning.
Departmental sovereignties have melted away as rapidly as national sovereignties under conditions of electric speed. Obsession with the older patterns of mechanical, one-way expansion from centers to margins is no longer relevant to our electric world. Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes.
This reverse pattern appeared quite early in electrical “labor-saving” devices, whether a toaster or washing machine or vacuum cleaner. Instead of saving work, these devices permit everybody to do his own work. What the nineteenth century had delegated to servants and housemaids we now do for ourselves.
::Primitive to modern in McLuhan’s view seems to equate to Normal vs Chaotic to Kuhn::
Marx based his analysis most untimely on the machine, just as the telegraph and other implosive forms began to reverse the mechanical dynamic.
The present chapter is concerned with showing that in any medium or structure there is what Kenneth Boulding calls a “break boundary at which the system suddenly changes into another or passes some point of no return in its dynamic processes.” Several such “break boundaries” will be discussed later, including the one from stasis to motion, and from the mechanical to the organic in the pictorial world.
::Once again, Kuhn::
The Greek dramatists presented the idea of creativity as creating, also, its own kind of blindness… It was as if the Greeks felt that the penalty for one break-through was a general sealing-off of awareness to the total field.
He who stands on tiptoe does not stand firm;He who takes the longest strides does not walk the fastest…He who boasts of what he will do succeeds in nothing;He who is proud of his work achieves nothing that endures.
::This harkens back to what Frankl refers to as intentional something or other::
One of the most common causes of breaks in any system is the cross-fertilization with another system, such as happened to print with the steam press, or with radio and movies (that yielded the talkies).
::Interesting theory, the cross-pollination of silent film and radio led to motion pictures as we know them now.::
But printing from movable type was, itself, the major break boundary in the history of phonetic literacy, just as the phonetic alphabet had been the break boundary between tribal and individualist man.
The endless reversals or break boundaries passed in the interplay of the structures of bureaucracy and enterprise include the point at which individuals began to be held responsible and accountable for their “private actions.” That was the moment of the collapse of tribal collective authority.
Centuries later, when further explosion and expansion had exhausted the powers of private action, corporate enterprise invented the idea of Public Debt, making the individual privately accountable for group action.
[Narcissus] had adapted to his extension of himself (via mirror) and had become a closed system.
Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves.
::Is this an indictment on media research in general?::
Any extension of ourselves they regard as “auto-amputation,” and they find that the auto-amputative power or strategy is resorted to by the body when the perceptual power cannot locate or avoid the cause of irritation.
::a.k.a. dissociation / externalization::
While it was no part of the intention of Jonas and Selye to provide an explanation of human invention and technology, they have given us a theory of disease (discomfort) that goes far to explain why man is impelled to extend various parts of his body by a kind of auto-amputation.
::a.k.a. mediative behavior::
Thus, the stimulus to new invention is the stress of acceleration of pace and increase of load.
This is the sense of the Narcissus myth. The young man’s image is a self-amputation or extension induced by irritating pressures. As counter-irritant, the image produces a generalized numbness or shock that declines recognition. Self-amputation forbids self-recognition.
The principle of self-amputation as an immediate relief of strain on the central nervous system applies very readily to the origin of the media of communication from speech to computer.
Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body.
To behold, use or perceive any extension of ourselves in technological form is necessarily to embrace it.
::Quantum physics again – Uncertainty Principle::
By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms. That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions. An Indian is the servo-mechanism of his canoe, as the cowboy of his horse, or the executive of his clock.
::McLuhan views it from the perspective of servitude, but I view it from the perspective of pursuing the highest-order possible interpretations or embodiments of these values or ideas. Maybe I'm misinterpreting something.::
Socially, it is the accumulation of group pressures and irritations that prompt invention and innovation as counter-irritants.
With our central nervous system strategically numbed, the tasks of conscious awareness and order are transferred to the physical life of man, so that for the first time he has become aware of technology as an extension of his physical body. Apparently this could not have happened before the electric age gave us the means of instant, total field-awareness.
The crossings or hybridizations of the media release great new force and energy as by fission or fusion.
In fact, of all the great hybrid unions that breed furious release of energy and change, there is none to surpass the meeting of literate and oral cultures.
The immediate prospect for literate, fragmented Western man encountering the electric implosion within his own culture is his steady and rapid transformation into a complex and depth-structured person emotionally aware of his total interdependence with the rest of human society.
If the student of media will but meditate on the power of this medium of electric light to transform every structure of time and space and work and society that it penetrates or contacts, he will have the key to the form of the power that is in all media to reshape any lives that they touch. Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the “content” of theater, obscuring the operation of both.
::IBut there seems to be no intentional symbolic communication going on here...::
What I am saying is that media as extensions of our senses institute new ratios, not only among our private senses, but among themselves, when they interact among themselves.
But from the point of view of the owners of the film and related media, the best seller is a form of insurance that some massive new gestalt or pattern has been isolated in the public psyche.
The hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born. For the parallel between two media holds us on the frontiers between forms that snap us out of the Narcissus-narcosis. The moment of the meeting of media is a moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them on our senses.
That technologies are ways of translating one kind of knowledge into another mode has been expressed by Lyman Bryson in the phrase “technology is explicitness.” Translation is thus a “spelling-out” of forms of knowledge.
All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms.
The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way. Words are a kind of information retrieval that can range over the total environment and experience at high speed.
Words are complex systems of metaphors and symbols that translate experience into our uttered or outer senses.
They are a technology of explicitness. By means of translation of immediate sense experience into vocal symbols the entire world can be evoked and retrieved at any instant.
In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.
By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems, by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of hands and feet and teeth and bodily heat-controls — all such extensions of our bodies, including cities – will be translated into information systems.
Under electric technology the entire business of man becomes learning and knowing. In terms of what we still consider an “economy” (the Greek word for a household), this means that all forms of employment become “paid learning,” and all forms of wealth result from the movement of information.
For man, as Julian Huxley observes, unlike merely biological creatures, possesses an apparatus of transmission and transformation based on his power to store experience. And his power to store, as in a language itself, is also a means of transformation of experience.
Those pearls that were his eyes.
Or we might return to the state of tribal man, for whom magic rituals are his means of “applied knowledge.” Instead of translating nature into art, the native non-literate attempts to invest nature with spiritual energy.
::Kind of, but not quite. We’re going to reach that point I’ve thought upon often – the point where we’re no longer able to feed ourselves because the process of nutrition has become so abstracted and removed from the origins of the production of the food we eat. A modern tribalism based on the perception of magical rituals more than anything else. E.g. rain dance for more food -> button sequence for more food::
If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?
It was Bertrand Russell who declared that the great discovery of the twentieth century was the technique of the suspended judgment… It anticipates the effect of, say, an unhappy childhood on an adult, and offsets the effect before it happens.
Hans Selye… had been baffled at why physicians always seemed to concentrate on the recognition of individual diseases and specific remedies for such isolated causes, while never paying any attention to the “syndrome of just being sick.
Those who are concerned with the program “content” of media and not with the medium proper, appear to be in the position of physicians who ignore the “syndrome of just being sick.”
::Are there multiple ways to approach the “syndrome of just being sick”?::
Hans Selye, in tackling a total, inclusive approach to the field of sickness, began what Adolphe Jonas has continued in Irritation and Counter-Irritation; namely, a quest for the response to injury as such, or to novel impact of any kind.
::Ok, there’s a connection I hadn’t made before. Field… field of study. The field of science/graphic design/etc. Field of vs quantum field::
The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.
For in operating on society with a new technology, it is not the incised area that is most affected. The area of impact and incision is numb. It is the entire system that is changed.
What we seek today is either a means of controlling these shifts in the sense-ratios of the psychic and social outlook, or a means of avoiding them altogether.
…the artist is indispensable in the shaping and analysis and understanding of the life of forms, and structures created by electric technology.
::the mediator or the designer might be better monikers::
The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.
I am curious to know what would happen if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one’s psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties.
For those parts of ourselves that we thrust out in the form of new invention are attempts to counter or neutralize collective pressures and irritations. But the counter-irritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug habit. And it is here that the artist can show us how to “ride with the punch,” instead of “taking it on the chin.”
Perhaps the most obvious “closure” or psychic consequence of any new technology is just the demand for it… This power of technology to create its own world of demand is not independent of technology being first an extension of our own bodies and senses.
The urge to continuous use is quite independent of the “content” of public programs or of the private sense life, being testimony to the fact that technology is part of our bodies.
Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.
Archimedes 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.” We have leased these “places to stand” to private corporations.
It is probably the long human history of enslavement, and the collapse into specialism as a counter-irritant, that have put the stigma of servitude and pusillanimity on the figure of the specialist, even in modern times.
Perfect adaptation to any environment is achieved by a total channeling of energies and vital force that amounts to a kind of static terminus for a creature.
Such is the plight of the representatives of “conventional wisdom” in any society. Their entire stake of security and status is in a single form of acquired knowledge, so that innovation is for them not novelty but annihilation.
Mere existence side by side of any two forms of organization generates a great deal of tension. Such, indeed, has been the principle of symbolist artistic structures in the past century.
When two societies exist side by side, the psychic challenge of the more complex one acts as an explosive release of energy in the simpler one.
In view of the endless power of men to hypnotize themselves into unawareness in the presence of challenge, it may be argued that willpower is as useful as intelligence for survival. Today we need also the will to be exceedingly informed and aware.
Had the Schoolmen with their complex oral culture understood the Gutenberg technology, they could have created a new synthesis of written and oral education, instead of bowing out of the picture and allowing the merely visual page to take over the educational enterprise.
Arnold Toynbee, in A Study of History, in considering “the nature of growths of civilizations,” not only abandons the concept of enlargement as a criterion of real growth of society, but states: “More often geographical expansion is a concomitant of real decline and coincides with a ‘time of troubles’ or a universal state – both of them takes of decline and disintegration.”
Toynbee expounds the principle that items of trouble or rapid change produce militarism, and it is militarism that produces empire and expansion.
Militarism is a kind of visual organization of social energies that is both specialist and explosive, so that it is merely repetitive to say, as Toynbee does, that it both creates large empires and causes social breakdown.
But militarism is a form of industrialism or the concentration of large amounts of homogenized energies into a few kinds of production.
The spoken word does not afford the extension and amplification of the visual power needed for habits of individualism and privacy.
It helps to appreciate the nature of the spoken word to contrast it with the written form. Although phonetic writing separates and extends the visual power of words, it is comparatively crude and slow. There are not many ways of writing “tonight,” but Stanislavsky used to ask his young actors to pronounce and stress it fifty different ways…
The written word spells out in sequence what is quick and implicit in the spoken word.
Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, lived and wrote in a tradition of thought in which it was and is considered that language is a human technology that has impaired and diminished the values of the collective unconscious… Without language, Bergson suggests, human intelligence would have remained totally involved in the objects of its attention.
Bergson argues in Creative Evolution that even consciousness is an extension of man that dims the bliss of union in the collective unconscious.
::So Bergson essentially thinks humans should be vegetative or animalistic… right…::
The patterns of the senses that are extended in the various languages of men are as varied as styles of dress and art. Each mother tongue teaches its users a way of seeing and feeling the world, and of acting in the world, that is quite unique.
The condition of “weightlessness” that biologists say promises a physical immortality, may be paralleled by the condition of speechlessness that could confer a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace.
::I found the end of this chapter chilling.::
Suppose that, instead of displaying the Stars and Stripes, we were to write the words “American flag” across a piece of cloth and to display that. While the symbols would convey the same meaning, the effect would be quite different. To translate the rich visual mosaic of the Stars and Stripes into written form would be to deprive it of most of its qualities of corporate image and of experience, yet the abstract literal bond would remain much the same.
Perhaps this illustration will serve to suggest the change the tribal man experiences when he becomes literate. Nearly all the emotional and corporate family feeling is eliminated from his relationship with his social group. He is emotionally free to separate from the tribe and to become a civilized individual, a man of visual organization who has uniform attitudes, habits, and rights with all other civilized individuals.
The phonetic alphabet is a unique technology. There have been many kinds of writing, pictographic and syllabic, but there is only one phonetic alphabet in which semantically meaningless letters are used to correspond to semantically meaningless sounds. This stark division and parallelism between a visual and an auditory world was both crude and ruthless, culturally speaking.
Only the phonetic alphabet makes such a sharp division in experience, giving to its user an eye for an ear, and freeing him from the tribal trance of resonating word magic and the web of kinship.
It can be argued, then, that the phonetic alphabet, alone, is the technology that has been the means of creating “civilized man” — the separate individuals equal before a written code of law.
Separateness of the individual, continuity of space and of time, and uniformity of codes are the prime marks of literate and civilized societies.
For the ideogram is an inclusive gestalt, not an analytic dissociation of senses and functions like phonetic writing.
It was David Hume who, in the eighteenth century, demonstrated that there is no causality indicated in any sequence, natural or logical. The sequential is merely additive, not causative.
Civilization is built on literacy because literacy is a uniform processing of a culture by a visual sense extended in space and time by the alphabet.
Oral cultures act and react at the same time. Phonetic culture endows men with the means of repressing their feelings and emotions when engaged in action.
To us the pipe is a convenience. We do not think of it as culture or as a product of literacy, any more than we think of literacy as changing our habits, our emotions, or our perceptions. To non-literate people, it is perfectly obvious that the most commonplace conveniences represent total changes in culture.
For the West, literacy has long been pipes and taps and streets and assembly lines and inventories. Perhaps most potent of all as an expression of literacy is our system of uniform pricing that penetrates distant markets and speeds the turnover of commodities.
Even our ideas of cause and effect in the literate West have long been in the form of things in sequence and succession, an idea that strikes any tribal or auditory culture as quite ridiculous, and one that has lost its prime place in our own new physics and biology.
Their unique separation of sight and sound from semantic and verbal content made them a most radical technology for the translation and homogenization of cultures.
The phonetic letters alone could be used to translate, albeit crudely, the sounds of any language into one-and-the-same visual code.
::At this stage in my reading of this book, my biggest problem with McLuhan’s paradigm is that it insists on treating the East and the West as separate entities that must remain as such. So far, he hasn’t really talked much about what an integration of the two would look like. Instead, he keeps talking about what a reversion back to Eastern/tribal would be like, and why it would be beneficial. The future we're headed towards seems more likely to be an integration of the two.::
To sum up, pictographic and hieroglyphic writing as used in Babylonian, Mayan, and Chinese cultures represents an extension of the visual sense for storing and expediting access to human experience. All of these forms give pictorial expression to oral meanings. As such, they approximate the animated cartoon and are extremely unwieldy, requiring many signs for the infinity of data and operations of social action.
In contrast, the phonetic alphabet, by a few letters only, was able to encompass all languages. Such an achievement, however, involved the separation of both signs and sounds from their semantic and dramatic meanings.
The new literacy had created an homogeneous and malleable milieu in which the mobility of armed groups and of ambitious individuals, equally, was as novel as it was practical.
It was not until the advent of the telegraph that messages could travel faster than a messenger. Before this, roads and the written word were closely interrelated. It is only since the telegraph that information has detached itself from such solid commodities as stone and papyrus…
Perhaps there is no more suitable way of defining the character of the electric age than by first studying the rise of the idea of transportation as communication, and then the transition of the idea from transport to information by means of electricity.
The word “metaphor” is from the Greek meta plus pherein, to carry across or transport. In this book, we are concerned with all forms of transport of goods and information, both as metaphor and exchange. Each form of transport not only carries, but translates and transforms the sender, the receiver, and the message.
The alteration of social groupings, and the formation of new communities, occur with the increased speed of information movement by means of paper messages and road transport. Such speedup means much more control at much greater distances.
Before the use of papyrus and alphabet created the incentives for building fast, hard-surface roads, the walled town and the city-state were natural forms that could endure.
Village and city-state essentially are forms that include all human needs and functions… Speedup tends to separate functions, both commercial and political, and acceleration beyond a point in any system becomes disruption and breakdown.
Speedup creates what some economists refer to as a center-margin structure. When this becomes too extensive for the generating and control center, pieces begin to detach themselves and to set up new center-margin systems of their own… Electric speeds create centers everywhere. Margins cease to exist on this planet.
Lack of homogeneity in speed of information movement creates diversity of patterns in organization. It is quite predictable, then, that any new means of moving information will alter any power structure whatever.
Whenever speedup has occurred, the new centralist power always takes action to homogenize as many marginal areas as possible.
::Yeah, this makes sense. You’ve accelerated the inevitability so that it’s now instead of later.::
The phonetic alphabet has no rival, however, as a translator of man out of the closed tribal echo-chamber into the neutral visual world of lineal organization.
Western man is himself being de-Westernized by his own new speedup, as much as the Africans are being detribalized by our old print and industrial technology. If we understood our own media old and new, these confusions and disruptions could be programmed and synchronized.
Nietzsche said understanding stops action, and men of action seem to have an intuition of the fact in their shunning the dangers of comprehension.
The point of the matter of speedup by wheel, road and paper is the extension of power in an ever more homogenous and uniform space.
The principal factors in media impact on existing social forms are acceleration and disruption. Today the acceleration tends to be total, and thus ends space as the main factor in social arrangements.
All means of interchange and of human interassociation tend to improve by acceleration. Speed, in turn, accentuates problems of form and structure.
::Repeat: Yeah, this makes sense. You’ve accelerated the inevitability so that it’s now instead of later.::
Since this process is still occurring, it should be easy for us to see that it was in the armies of Egypt and Rome that a kind of democratization by uniform technological education occurred.
The Roman cities began that way—as specialist operations of the central power. The Greek cities ended that way.
So that even though the city was formed as a kind of protective hide or shield for man, this protective layer was purchased at the cost of maximized struggle within the walls. Nevertheless, it was amidst such irritations that man produced his greatest inventions as counter-irritants.
All organizations, but especially biological ones, struggle to remain constant in their inner condition amidst the variations of outer shock and change.
The third stage of struggle for equilibrium among the forces within the city took the form of empire, or a universal state, that generated the extension of human senses in wheel, road, and alphabet.
The full-blown city coincides with the development of writing — especially of phonetic writing, the specialist form of writing that makes a division between sight and sound.
The effects of phonetic literacy do not depend upon persuasion or cajolery for their acceptance. This technology for translating the resonating tribal world into Euclidean lineality and visuality is automatic.
For new speed and power are never compatible with existing spatial and social arrangements.
::This reminds me of Richard.::
In the Roman world the army was the work force of a mechanized wealth-creating process…
The Roman army as a mobile, industrial wealth-making force created in addition a vast consumer public in the Roman towns. Division of labor always creates a separation between producer and consumer, even as it tends to separate the place of work and the living space.
panem et circenses-> bread and circuses : sustenance and entertainment provided by government to appease public discontent
(Panem et circenses) The private sponge and the collective sponge, both reaching out for their rations of sensation, achieved a horrible distinctness and clarity that matched the raw power of the predatory army machine.
::This is still happening today…::
::Papyrus -> Parchment -> Paper::
With the moving of information in printed form, the wheel and the road came into play again after having been in abeyance for a thousand years.
Print, or mechanized writing, introduced a separation and extension of human functions unimaginable even in Roman times.
War is never anything less than accelerated technological change. It begins when some notable disequilibrium among existing structures has been brought about by inequality of rates of growth.
::This relates back to the previous observation that any biological system is seeking homeostatic equilibrium.::
“As knowledge was spread out visually and as it became more accessible in alphabetic form, it was localized and divided into specialties.”Up to the point just short of electrification, increase of speed produces division of function, and of social classes, and of knowledge. At electric speed, however, all that is reversed. Implosion and contraction then replace mechanical explosion and expansion.
If the Handlin formula is extended to power, it becomes:
“As power grew, and as outlying areas became accessible to power, it was localized in distinctive delegated jobs and functions.”This formula is a principle of acceleration at all levels of human organization.
When information moves at the speed of signals in the central nervous system, man is confronted with the obsolescence of all earlier forms of acceleration, such as road and rail. What emerges is a total field of inclusive awareness.
It is to the railroad that the American city owes its abstract grid layout, and the nonorganic separation of production, consumption, and residence.
Our electric extensions of ourselves simply by-pass space and time, and create problems of human involvement and organization for which there is no precedent.
The power of sheer numbers, in wealth or in crowds, to set up a dynamic drive toward growth and aggrandizement is mysterious.
The drive toward unlimited growth inherent in any kind of crowd, heap, or horde would seem to link economic and population inflation.
The pleasure of being among the masses is the sense of the joy in the multiplication of numbers, which has long been suspect among the literate members of Western society.
::lol then this explains my affinity for minimalism in all its forms. But really, that’s an interesting possible correlation between introversion and minimalism::
the separation of the individual from the group in space (privacy), and in thought (“point of view”), and in work (specialism)
Phonetic letters and numbers were the first means of fragmenting and detribalizing man.
::then is he implying the same about symbolism and communication?::
Moholy-Nagy notes how, to Europeans, America seems to be the land of abstractions, where numbers have taken on an existence of their own in phrases like “57 Varieties,” “the 5 and 10,” or “7 Up” and “behind the 8-ball.”
Perhaps this is a kind of echo of an industrial culture that depends heavily on prices, charts, and figures.
Baudelaire had the true intuition of number as a tactile hand or nervous system for interrelating separate units, when he said that “number is within the individual. Intoxication is a number.”
Number, that is to say, is not only auditory and resonant, like the spoken word, but originates in the sense of touch, of which it is an extension. The statistical aggregation or crowding of numbers yields the current cave-drawings or finger-paintings of the statisticians’ charts.
We need not feel grateful to apocalyptic writers like Spengler, who see our technologies as cosmic visitors from outer space. The Spenglers are tribally entranced men who crave the swoon back into collective unconsciousness and all the intoxication of number.
It is certainly an indication of a developing visual stress in a culture when number appears.
A closely integrated tribal culture will not easily yield to the separatist visual and individualistic pressures that lead to the division of labor, and then to such accelerated forms as writing and money. On the other hand, Western man, were he determined to cling to the fragmented and individualist ways that he has derived from the printed word in particular, would be well advised to scrap all his electric technology since the telegraph.
It seems contradictory that the fragmenting and divisive power of our analytic Western world should derive from an accentuation of the visual faculty. This same visual sense is, also, responsible for the habit of seeing all things as continuous and connected.
Fragmentation by means of visual stress occurs in that isolation of moment in time, or of aspect in space, that is beyond the power of touch, or hearing, or smell, or movement. By imposing unvisualizable relationships that are the result of instant speed, electric technology dethrones the visual sense and restores us to the dominion of synesthesia, and the close interinvolvement of the other senses.
It never occurred to him that the ratio among corporeal things could never be less than rational. That is to say, rationality or consciousness is itself a ratio or proportion among the sensuous components of experience, and is not something added to such sense experience.
Consciousness, complex and subtle, can be impaired or ended by a mere stepping-up or dimming-down of any one sense intensity, which is the procedure in hypnosis. And the intensification of one sense by a new medium can hypnotize an entire community.
This is a striking instance of how easily men of any one particular culture will panic when some familiar pattern or landmark gets smudged or shifted because of the indirect pressure of new media.
We have already seen how the phonetic technology fostered visual continuity and individual point of view, and how these contributed to the rise of uniform Euclidean space.