Marshall McLuhan. Understanding
Media: The Extensions of Man. New York:
McGraw Hill, 1964.
Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media (Hardback 1st Edition)
Introduction
After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electronic 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. Whether the extension of consciousness, so long sought by advertisers for specific products, will be “a good thing” is a question that admits of a wide solution. There is little possibility of answering such questions about the extensions of man without considering all of them together. Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex. (pp. 3-4)
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. (p.
4)
Western man acquired from the
technology of literacy the power to act without reacting. The advantages of fragmenting himself in
this way are seen in the case of the surgeons who would be quite helpless if he
were to become humanly involved in his operation. 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
every action. It is no longer possible
to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.
(p. 4)
The aspiration of our time for
wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness is a natural adjunct of electric
technology. The age of mechanical
industry that preceded us found vehement assertion of private outlook the
natural the natural mode of expression.
Every culture and every age has its favorite model of perception and
knowledge that it is inclined to prescribe for everybody and everything. 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. Such is the faith in which this book has
been written. It explores the contours
of our own extended beings in our technologies, seeking the principle of
intelligibility in each of them. In the
full confidence that it is possible to win an understanding of these forms that
will bring them into orderly service, I have looked at them anew, accepting
very little of the conventional wisdom concerning them. (p. 6)
One can say of media as Robert
Theobald has said of economic depressions:
“There is one additional factor that has helped to control depressions,
and that is a better understanding of their development.” 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 or society. (p.
6)
Media Hot Cold
There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like
radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a
cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in
"high definition." High definition is the state of being well filled
with data. A photograph is, visually, "high definition." (p. 23)
A cartoon is "low definition," simply because very
little visual information is provided. Telephone is a cool medium, or one of
low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And
speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so
much has to be filled in by the listener. (p. 23)
On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in
or completed by the audience. 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. (p. 23)
A cool medium like hieroglyphic or ideogrammic written characters
has very different effects from the hot and explosive medium of the phonetic
alphabet. The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual
intensity, became typography. The printed word with its specialist intensity
burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, creating extreme
individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly. But the typical reversal
occurred when extremes of monopoly brought back the corporation, with its
impersonal empire over many lives. (p. 23)
The hotting-up of the medium of writing to repeatable print
intensity led to nationalism and the religious wars of the sixteenth century.
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. (p. 23)
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. With print many earlier forms were excluded from life and art, and
many were given strange new intensity. But our own time is crowded with
examples of the principle that the hot form excludes, and the cool one
includes. When ballerinas began to dance on their toes a century ago, it was
felt that the art of the ballet had acquired a new "spirituality."
With this new intensity, male figures were excluded from ballet. (p. 24)
The role of women had also become fragmented with the advent of
industrial specialism and the explosion of home functions into laundries,
bakeries, and hospitals on the periphery of the community. 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. (p. 24)
The new electric structuring and configuring of life more and more
encounters the old lineal and fragmentary procedures and tools of analysis from
the mechanical age. More and more we turn from the content of messages to study
total effect. Kenneth Boulding put this matter in The Image by saying,
"The meaning of a message is the change which it produces in the
image." 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 Strangely, there is recognition of this
matter of effect rather than information in the British idea of libel:
"The greater the truth, the greater the libel." (p. 26)
3. Reversal of the Overheated Medium
The decision to use the hot printed medium in place of the cool,
participational, telephone medium is unfortunate in the extreme. No doubt the
decision was prompted by the literary bias of the West for the printed form, on
the ground that it is more impersonal than the telephone. (pp. 33-34)
The stepping-up of speed from the mechanical to the instant electric
form reverses explosion into implosion. In our present electric age the
imploding or contracting energies of our world now clash with the old
expansionist and traditional patterns of organization. Until recently our
institutions and arrangements, social, political, and economic, had shared a
one-way pattern. (p. 36)
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. In fact, it is not the increase of numbers in the
world that creates our concern with population. Rather, it is the fact that
everybody in the world has to live in the utmost proximity created by our
electric involvement in one another's lives. In education, likewise, it is not
the increase in numbers of those seeking to learn that creates the crisis. Our
new concern with education follows upon the changeover to an interrelation in
knowledge, where before the separate subjects of the curriculum had stood apart
from each other. (p. 36)
Electric power, equally available in the farmhouse and the
Executive Suite, permits any place to be a center, and does not require large
aggregations. 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. This principle applies in toto in
the electric age. In politics, it permits Castro to exist as independent
nucleus or center. (p. 36)
It would permit Quebec to leave the Canadian union in a way quite
inconceivable under the regime of the railways. The railways require a uniform
political and economic space. On the other hand, airplane and radio permit the
utmost discontinuity and diversity in spatial organization. (p. 36)
Today the great principle of classical physics and economics and
political science, namely that of the divisibility of each process, has reversed
itself by sheer extension into the unified field theory; and automation in
industry replaces the divisibility of process with the organic interlacing of
all functions in the complex. The electric tape succeeds the assembly line. (p.
36)
In the new electric Age of Information and programmed production,
commodities themselves assume more and more the character of information,
although this trend appears mainly in the increasing advertising budget.
Significantly, it is those commodities that are most used in social
communication, cigarettes, cosmetics, and soap (cosmetic removers) that bear
much of the burden of the upkeep of the media in general. As electric
information levels rise, almost any kind of material will serve any kind of
need or function, forcing the intellectual more and more into the role of
social command and into the service of production. (p. 36)
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 an other 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. One
effect of the static photo had been to suppress the conspicuous consumption of
the rich, but the effect of the speed-up of the photo had been to provide
fantasy riches for the poor of the entire globe. (p. 38)
Today the road beyond its break boundary turns cities into
highways, and the highway proper takes on a continuous urban character. Another
characteristic reversal after passing a road break boundary is that the country
ceases to be the center of all work, and the city ceases to be the center of
leisure. In fact, improved roads and transport have reversed the ancient
pattern and made cities the centers of work and the country the place of
leisure and of recreation. (p. 38)
Earlier, the increase of traffic that came with money and roads
had ended the static tribal state (as Toynbee calls the nomadic food-gathering
culture). Typical of the reversing that occurs at break boundaries is the
paradox that nomadic mobile man, the hunter and food-gatherer, is socially
static. On the other hand, sedentary, specialist man is dynamic, explosive,
progressive. The new magnetic or world city will be static and iconic or
inclusive. (p. 38)
The Greek myth of Narcissus
is directly concerned with a fact of human experience, as the word Narcissus
indicates. It is from the Greek word narcosis, or numbness. The youth
Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This
extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism
of his own extended or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love
with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to
his extension of himself and had become a closed system. (p. 41)
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.
(p. 43)
Physiologically, the central
nervous system, that electric net work that coordinates the various media of
our senses, plays the chief role. Whatever threatens its function must be
contained, localized, or cut off, even to the total removal of the offending
organ. The function of the body, as a group of sustaining and protective organs
for the central nervous system; is to act as buffers against sudden variations
of stimulus in the physical and social environment. Sudden social failure or
shame is a shock that some may "take to heart" or that may cause
muscular disturbance in general, signaling for the person to withdraw from the
threatening situation. (p. 43)
Therapy, whether physical or
social, is a counter-irritant that aids in that equilibrium of the physical
organs which protect the central nervous system. Whereas pleasure is a counter-irritant
(e.g., sports, entertainment, and alcohol), comfort is the removal of
irritants. Both pleasure and comfort are strategies of equilibriurn for the
central nervous system. (p. 43)
With the arrival of electric
technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central
nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that
suggests a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous
system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers
against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism. It could well be that
the successive mechanizations of the various physical organs since the
invention of printing have made too violent and superstimulated a social
experience for the central nervous system to endure. (p. 43)
Depending on which sense or
faculty is extended technologically, or "autoamputated," the
"closure" or equilibrium-seeking among the other senses is fairly
predictable. It is with the senses as it is with color. Sensation is always 100
per cent, and a color is always 100 per cent color. But the ratio among the
components in the sensation or the color can differ infinitely. Yet if sound,
for example, is intensified, touch and taste and sight are affected at once.
The effect of radio on literate or visual man was to reawaken his tribal
memories, and the effect of sound added to motion pictures was to diminish the
role of mime, tactility, and kinesthesis. Similarly, when nomadic man turned to
sedentary and specialist ways, the senses specialized too. The development of
writing and the visual organization of life made possible the discovery of
individualism, introspection and so on. (p. 44)
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. There have been cynics who insisted that
men fall deepest in love with women who give them back their own image. Be that
as it may, the wisdom of the Narcissus myth does not convey any idea that
Narcissus fell in love with anything he regarded as himself. Obviously he would
have had very different feelings about the image had he known it was an
extension or repetition of himself. It is, perhaps, indicative of the bias of
our intensely technological and, therefore, narcotic culture that we have long
interpreted the Narcissus story to mean that he fell in love with himself, that
he imagined the reflection to be Narcissus! (p. 41)
To behold, use or perceive
any extension of ourselves in technological form is necessarily to embrace it.
To listen to radio or to read the printed page is to accept these extensions of
ourselves into our personal system and to undergo the "closure" or
displacement of perception that follows automatically. It is this continuous
embrace of our own technology in daily use that puts us in the Narcissus role
of subliminal awareness and numbness in relation to these images of ourselves.
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. (p. 47)
Physiologically, man in the normal
use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by
it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as
it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world,
enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world
reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in
providing him with wealth. One of the merits of motivation research has been
the revelation of man's sex relation to the motorcar. (p. 47)
Socially, it is the
accumulation of group pressures and irritations that prompt invention and
innovation as counter-irritants. (p. 47)
The principle of numbness
comes into play with electric technology, as with any other. We have to numb
our central nervous system when it is extended and exposed, or we will die.
Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the
unconscious and of apathy. But it is strikingly the age of consciousness of the
unconscious, in addition. With our central nervous system strategically numbed,
the tasks of conscious aware ness 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. With such
awareness, the subliminal life, private and social, has been hoisted up into
full view, with the result that we have "social consciousness"
presented to us as a cause of guilt-feelings. Existentialism offers a
philosophy of structures, rather than categories, and of total social
involvement instead of the bourgeois spirit of individual separateness or
points of view. In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin. (p. 48)
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 outered 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. (p. 56)
Our very word
"grasp" or "apprehension" points to the process of getting
at one thing through another, of handling and sensing many facets at a time
through more than one sense at a time. It begins to be evident that
"touch" is not skin but the interplay 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)
The "common sense"
was for many centuries held to be the peculiar human power of translating one
kind of experience of one sense into all the senses, and presenting the result
continuously as a unified image to the mind. In fact, this image of a unified
ratio among the senses was long held to be the mark of our rationality, and may
in the computer age easily become so again. For it is now possible to program
ratios among the senses that approach the condition of consciousness. (p. 60)
Yet such a condition would
necessarily be an extension of our own consciousness as much as wheel is an
extension of feet in rotation. Having extended or translated our central
nervous system into the electromagnetic technology, it is but a further stage
to transfer our consciousness to the computer world as well. Then, at least, we
shall be able to program consciousness in such wise that it cannot be numbed
nor distracted by the Narcissus illusions of the entertainment world that beset
mankind when he encounters himself extended in his own gimmickry. (p. 60)
7. Challenge and Collapse: The Nemesis of Creativity
It was Bertrand Russell who declared that the great discovery of
the twentieth century was the technique of the suspended judgment. A.N.
Whitehead, on the other hand, explained how the great discovery of the
nineteenth century was the discovery of the technique of discovery. Namely, the
technique of starting with the thing to be discovered and working back, step by
step, as on an assembly line, to the point at which it is necessary to start in
order to reach the desired object. In the arts this meant starting with the effect
and then inventing a poem, painting, or building that would have just that
effect and no other. (p. 62)
But the "technique of the suspended judgment" goes
further. It anticipates the effect of, say, an unhappy childhood on an adult,
and offsets the effect before it happens. In psychiatry, it is the technique of
total permissiveness extended as an anesthetic for the mind, while various
adhesions and moral effects of false judgments are systematically eliminated.
(p. 62)
This is a very different thing from the numbing or narcotic effect
of new technology that lulls attention while the new form slams the gates of
judgment and perception. For massive social surgery is needed to insert new
technology into the group mind, and this is achieved by the built-in numbing
apparatus discussed earlier. Now the "technique of the suspended
judgment" presents the possibility of rejecting the narcotic and of
postponing indefinitely the operation of inserting the new technology in the
social psyche. A new stasis is in prospect. (p. 63)
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. If the operations are needed, the
inevitability of infecting the whole system during the operation has to be
considered. 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. The effect of radio is visual, the effect
of the photo is auditory. Each new impact shifts the ratios among all the
senses. 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. To have a disease without its symptoms is to be immune. No society
has ever known enough about its actions to have developed immunity to its new
extensions or technologies. Today we have begun to sense that art may be able
to provide such immunity. (p. 64)
The artist can correct the sense ratios before the blow of new
technology has numbed conscious procedures. He can correct them before numbness
and subliminal groping and reaction begin. If this is true, how is it possible
to present the matter to those who are in a position to do something about it? If
there were even a remote likelihood of this analysis being true, it would
warrant a global armistice and period of stock- taking. If it is true that the
artist possesses the means of anticipating and avoiding the consequences of
technological trauma, then what are we to think of the world and bureaucracy of
"art appreciation"? (p. 66)
The Written Word
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 auditory world was both crude and ruthless, culturally speaking. (p. 83)
The
phonetically written word sacrifices worlds of meaning and perception that were
secured by forms like the hieroglyph and the Chinese idiogram. These culturally richer forms of writing,
however, offered men no means of sudden transfer from the magically
discontinuous and traditional world of the tribal word into the cool and
uniform visual medium. (p. 83)
As an
intensification and extension of the visual function, the phonetic alphabet
diminishes the role of the other senses of sound and touch and taste in any
literate culture. (p. 84)
Only
alphabetic cultures have ever mastered connected lineal sequences as pervasive
forms of psychic and social organization.
The breaking up of every kind of experience into uniform units in order
to produce faster action and change of form (applied knowledge) has been the
secret of Western power over man and nature alike. (p. 85)
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. In tribal cultures, experience is arranged
by a dominant auditory sense-life that represses visual values. The auditory sense, unlike the cool and
neutral eye, is hyper-esthetic and delicate and all-inclusive. 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 act without reacting, without
involvement, is the peculiar advantage of Western literate man. (p. 86)
Roads and Paper Routes
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, much as money had earlier detached
itself from hides, bullion, and metals, and has ended as paper. (p. 89)
The term
“communication” has had an extensive use in connection with roads and bridges,
sea routes, rivers, and canals, even before it became transformed into
“information movement” in the electric age.
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. (p. 89)
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 carriers, but translates and transforms, the sender, the
receiver, and the message. The use of any kind of medium or extension of man
alters the patterns of interdependence among people, as it alters the ratios
among out senses. (pp. 89-90)
It is a
persistent theme of this book that all technologies are extensions of our
physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed. Again, unless there were such increases of
power and speed, new extensions of ourselves would not occur or would be
discarded. For an increase of power or
speed in any kind of groupings of any components whatever is itself a
disruption that causes a change of organization. (p. 90)
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 speed-up means
much more control as much greater distances. (p. 90)
Although
America developed a massive service of inland canals and river steamboats, they
were not geared to the speeding wheels of the new industrial production. The railroad was needed to cope with
mechanized production, as much as to span the great distances of the
continent. The steam railroad as an
accelerator proved to be one of the most revolutionary of all extensions of our
physical bodies, creating a new political centralism and a new kind of urban
shape and size. It is the railroad that
the American city owes its abstract grid layout, and the nonorganic motorcar
that scrambled the abstract shape of the industrial town, mixing up its
separated functions to a degree that has frustrated and baffled both planner
and citizen. (p. 104)
It
remained for the airplane to complete the confusion by amplifying the mobility
of the citizen to the point where urban space as such was irrelevant. Metropolitan space is equally irrelevant for
the telephone, the telegraph, the radio, and the television. What the town planners call “the human
scale” in discussing ideal urban spaces is equally unrelated to these electric
forms. 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. We may yet yearn for the simple days of the
automobile and the superhighway. (pp.
104-105)
Number
Like
money and clocks and all other forms of measurement, numbers acquired a
separate life and intensity with the growth of literacy. Nonliterate societies had small use for
numbers, and today the nonliterate digital computer substitutes “yes” and “no”
for numbers. The computer is strong on
contours, weak on digits. In effect,
then, the electric age brings number back into unity with visual and auditory
experience, for good or ill. (p. 110)
For the
Renaisswance, it was the infinitesimal calculus that enabled arithmetic to take
over mechanics, physics, and geometry.
The idea of an infinite but continuous and uniform process, so basic to
the Gutenberg technology of movable types, gave rise to the calculus. Banish the infinite process and mathematics,
pure and applied, is reduced to the state known to the pre-Pythagoreans. This is to say, banish the new medium of
print with its fragmented technology of uniform, lineal repeatability, and
modern mathematics disappears. Apply,
however, this infinite uniform process to finding the length of an arc, and all
that need be done is to inscribe in the arc a sequence of rectilinear contours
of an increasing number of sides. When
these contours approach a limit, the length of the arc becomes the limit of
this sequence. The older method of
determining volumes by liquid displacement is thus translated into abstract
visual terms by calculus. The
principles regarding the concept of length apply also to notions of areas,
volumes, masses, moments, pressures, forces, stresses and strains, velocities
and accelerations. (p. 117)
The
miracle-maker, the sheer function of the infinitely fragmented and repeatable,
became the means of making visually flat, straight, and uniform all that was
nonvisual: the skew, the curved, and
the bumpy. In the same way, the
phonetic alphabet had, centuries before, invaded the discontinuous cultures of
the barbarians, and translated their sinuosities and obstusities, into the
uniformities of the visual culture of the Western world. It is this uniform, connected, and visual
order that we still use as the norm of “rational” living. In our electric age of instant and nonvisual
forms of interrelation, therefore, we find ourselves at a loss to define the
“rational,” if only because we never
noticed whence it came in the first place. (pp. 117-118)
Clothing
Economists
have estimated that an unclad society eats 40 per cent more than one in Western
attire. Clothing as an extension of our
skin helps to store and to channel energy, so that if the Westerner needs less
food, he may also demand more sex. Yet
neither clothing nor sex can be understood as separate isolated factors, and
many sociologists have noted that sex can become a compensation for crowded
living. Privacy, like individualism, is
unknown in tribal societies, a fact that Westerners need to keep in mind when
estimating the attractions of our way of life to nonliterate peoples. (p. 119)
Clothing,
as an extension of the skin, can be seen both as a heat-control mechanism and
as a means of defining the self socially.
In these respects, clothing and housing are near twins, though clothing
is both nearer and elder; for housing extends the inner heat-control mechanisms
of our organism, while clothing is a more direct extension of our outer surface
of the body. (pp. 119-120)
> see
Vogue Magazine
Today in
America there is a revolutionary attitude expressed as much in our attire as in
our patios and small cars. For a decade
or more, women’s dress and hair styles have abandoned visual or iconic – or
sculptural and tactual – stress.
Like
toreador pants and gaiter stockings, the beehive hairdo is also iconic and
sensuously inclusive, rather than abstractly visual. (p. 121)
In a
word, the American woman for the first time presents herself as a person to be
touched and handled, not just to be looked at.
(p. 121)
In the
age of the bikini and of skin-diving, we begin to understand "the castle
of our skin" as a space and world of its own. Gone are the thrills of strip-tease. Nudity could be naughty excitement only for a visual culture that
had divorced itself from the audile-tactile values of less abstract
societies. (p. 121)
As late
as 1930. four-letter words made visual on the printed page seemed
portentous. Words that most people used
every hour of the day became as frantic as nudity, when printed. (p. 121)
McLuhan, Money
Money,
a social means of extending and amplifying work and skill in an easily
accessible and portable form, lost much of its magical power with the coming of
representative money, or paper money.
Just as speech lost its magic with writing, and further with printing,
when printed money supplanted gold the compelling aura of it disappeared. (p. 134)
Money as
a social medium or extension of an inner wish and motive creates social and
spiritual values, as happens even in fashions in women’s dress. (p. 135)
Conformity
to this fashion literally gives currency to a style or fabric, creating
a social medium that increases wealth and expression thereby. Does not this stress how money, or any
medium whatever, is constituted and made efficacious? (p. 135)
“Money
talks” because money is a metaphor, a transfer, and a bridge. Like words and language, money is a
storehouse of communally achieved work, skill, and experience. Money, however, is also a specialist
technology like writing; and as writing intensifies the visual aspect of speech
and order, and as the clock visually separates time from space, so money
separates work from the other social functions. (p. 136)
Even
today money is a language for translating the work of the farmer into the work
of the barber, doctor, engineer, or plumber.
As a vast social metaphor, bridge, or translator, money – like writing –
speeds up exchange and tightens the bonds of interdependence in any
community. It gives great spatial
extension and control to political organizations, just as writing does, or the
calendar. It is action at a distance,
both in space and in time. In a highly
literate, fragmented society, “Time is money,” and money is the store of other
people’s time and effort. (p. 136)
The
extreme abstraction and detachment represented by our pricing system is quite
unthinkable and unusable amidst populations for whom the exciting drama of
price haggling occurs with every transaction.
(p. 137)
Today,
as the new vortices of power are shaped by the instant electric interdependence
of all men on this planet, the visual factor in social organization and in
personal experience recedes, and money begins to be less and less a means of
storing or exchanging work and skill.
Automation, which is electronic, does not represent physical work so
much as programmed knowledge. As work
is replaced by the sheer movement of information, money as a store of work
merges with the informational forms of credit and credit card. From coin to paper currency, and from
currency to credit card there is a steady progression toward commercial
exchange as the movement of information itself. (p. 137)
It was
not the clock, but literacy reinforced by the clock, that created abstract time
and led men to eat, not when they were hungry, but when it was “time to
eat.” (p. 154)
Lewis
Mumford makes a telling observation when he says that the abstract mechanical
time-sense of the renaissance enabled men to live in the classical past, and to
tear themselves out of their own present.
Here again, it was the printing press that made possible the re-creation
of the classic past by mass production of its literature and texts.
The
establishment of a mechanical and abstract time pattern soon extends
itself to periodic alteration of clothing styles, much in the same way that
mass production extends itself to periodic publication of newspapers and
magazines.
Today we
take for granted that the job of Vogue magazine is to alter the dress
styles as part of the process of its being printed at all. When a thing is current, it creates
currency; fashion creates wealth by moving textiles and making them ever more
current. (p. 154)
Clocks
are mechanical media that transform tasks and create new work and wealth by
accelerating the pace of human association.
By coordinating and accelerating human meetings and goings-on, clocks
increase the sheer quantity of human exchange.
The
clock dragged man out of the world of seasonal rhythms and recurrence, as
effectively as the alphabet had released him from the magical resonance of the
spoken word and the tribal trap. (p.
155)
The art
of making pictorial statements in a precise and repeatable form is one that we
have long taken for granted in the West.
But it is usually forgotten that without prints and blueprints, without
maps and geometry, the world of modern sciences and technologies would hardly
exist. (p. 157)
All the
words in the world cannot describe an object like a bucket, although it is
possible to tell in a few words how to make a bucket. This inadequacy of words to convey visual
information about objects was an effectual block on the development of the
Greek and Roman sciences. (p. 158)
Well
before Gutenberg’s development of printing from moveable types, a great deal of
printing on paper by woodcut had been done.
Perhaps the most popular form of this kind of block printing of text and
image had been in the form of the Biblia Pauperum, or Bibles of the
Poor. Printers in this woodcut sense
preceded typographic printers, though by just how long a period it is not easy
to establish, because these cheap and popular prints, despised by the learned, were
not preserved any more than are the comic books of today. The great law of bibliography comes into
play in this matter of the printing that precedes Gutenberg: “The more there
are, the fewer there are.” It applies
to many items besides printed matter – to the postage stamp and to the early
forms of radio receiving sets. (p. 159)
In the
low definition world of the medieval woodcut, each object created its own
space, and there was no rational connected space into which it must fit. As the retinal impression is intensified,
objects cease to cohere in a space of their own making, and, instead, become,
“contained” in a uniform, continuous, and “rational” space. (p. 163)
Comics: MAD Vestibule to TV
The
structural qualities of the print and woodcut obtain, also, in the cartoon, all
of which share a participational and do-it-yourself character that pervades a
wide variety of media experiences today.
The print is clue to the comic cartoon, just as the cartoon is clue to
understanding the TV image. (p. 165)
The
comic strip and the ad, then, both belong to the world of games, to the world
of models, and extensions of situations elsewhere. MAD magazine, world of the woodcut, the print, and the cartoon,
brought them together with other games and models from the world of
entertainment. (p. 169)
MAD is a
kind of newspaper mosaic of the ad as entertainment, and entertainment as a
form of madness. Above all, it is a
print- and woodcut-form of expression and experience whose sudden appeal is a
sure index of deep changes in our culture.
(p. 169)
Our need
now is to understand the formal character of print, comic and cartoon, both as
challenging and changing the consumer-culture of film, photo, and press. There is no single approach to this task,
and no single observation or idea that can solve so complex a problem in
changing human perception. (p. 169)
Wheel, Bicycle, and Airplane
To come
more directly to our subject of the wheel, Lynn White explains how the
evolution of the wheel in the Middle Ages was related to the development of the
horsecollar and the harness. The
greater speed and endurance of the horse was not available for cartage until
the discovery of the collar. But once
evolved, this horse-harness led to the development of wagons with pivoted front
axles and brakes. (p. 180)
The
four-wheel wagon capable of hauling heavy loads was a common feature by the
middle of the thirteenth century. The
effects on town life were extraordinary.
Peasants began to live in cities while going each day to their fields,
almost in the manner of motorized Saskatchewan farmers. These latter live mainly in the city, having
no housing in the country beyond sheds for their tractors and equipment. (p. 180)
With the
coming of the horse-drawn bus and streetcar, American towns developed housing
that was no longer within sight of shop or factory. The railroad next took over the development of the suburbs, with
housing kept within walking distance of the railroad stop. (p. 180)
Perhaps
the main feature of all tools and machines – economy of gesture – is the
immediate expression of any physical pressure which impels us to outer or to
extend ourselves, whether in worlds or in wheels. (p. 181)
The
wheel made the road, and moved produce faster from fields to settlements. Acceleration created larger and larger
centers, more and more specialism, and more intense incentives, aggregates, and
aggressions. So it is that the wheeled
vehicle makes its appearance at once as a war chariot, just as the urban
center, created by the wheel, makes its appearance as an aggressive
stronghold. No further motivation than
the compounding and consolidating of specialist skills by acceleration of the
wheel is needed to explain the mounting degree of human creativity and
destructiveness. (p. 184)
The wheel
and the road are centralizers because they accelerate up to a point that ships
cannot. But acceleration beyond a
certain point, when it occurs by means of the automobile and the plane, creates
decentralism in the midst of the older centralism. This is the order of urban chaos in our time. The wheel, pushed beyond a certain intensity
of movement, no longer centralizes. (p. 185)