I know people like all the people in that little vignette. -g-
Here is McLuhan waxing philisophic :
Lecture by Marshall McLuhan
Florida State University, 1970
One of the big flips that's taking place in our time is the
changeover from the eye to the ear. And most of us, having
grown up in the visual world, are now suddenly confronted with
the problems of living in an acoustic world, which is in effect a
world of simultaneous information. The visual world has very
peculiar properties and the acoustic world has quite different
properties. The visual world, which belongs to the old 19th
century and which had been around for quite awhile, say from the
16th century anyway, the visual world has the properties of being
sort of continuous and connected and homogeneous, all parts
more or less alike and stayed put. If you had a point of view, that
stayed put. The acoustic world, which is the electric world of
simultaneity, has no continuity, no homogeneity, no connections,
and no stasis. Everything is changing. So that's quite a big shift, I
mean to move from one of those worlds to the other is a a very
big shift. It's the same shift that Alice in Wonderland made you
know when she went through the looking glass. She moved out of
the visual world and into the acoustic world when she went
through the looking glass.
Now to explain a bit about the implications of this rather
large shift. It concerns the whole problem of learning and
teaching and social life and politics and entertainment and I'm
going to try to tie it into some of those places. But first I will try
to make it a little bit more meaningful about the how we became
visual in the first place.
There is only one part of the world that ever did go visual,
and that is the western Greco- Roman Hellenistic world and
about 500 B.C., something happened which made it possible to
flip out of the old acoustic world, which was the normal one of the
tribal Greek society, the Homeric world. Something happened
which flipped them out of the old Homeric world of the bards into
this new rational, philosophically logical, connected, private,
individualistic, civilized world. And that thing is called the
phonetic alphabet. Now the origins of the phonetic alphabet are
by no means clear at all. All we know is what it what it did to
people. The phonetic alphabet has a very peculiar set of
characteristics which are not shared by any other alphabet on
this planet. The phonetic alphabet, the one that you all call the
ABCs, has a very peculiar structure. It is made up of phonemes,
that is bits that are meaningless. The 26 letters of our alphabet
have no meaning at all. Now they're called phonemes because
that, in linguistic terms, means the smallest possible meaningless
bit. Now all the other alphabets in the world, the Hebrew and the
Arabic and the Hindu, the Chinese and so on, all of those
alphabets are morphemic. The bits they are made of have
meaning. Some meaning, however small.
Now one of the peculiar things that happened with the
phonetic alphabet was that the people who used it underwent a
kind of fission. Their sensory life exploded and the visual part of
it was cut off from the kinetic, acoustic and tactile parts. In all the
other parts of the world where writing is employed, the visual life
has always remained associated with the acoustic life and the
tactile life and the kinetic life. The Chinese ideogram is a
wonderful instrument of unified sensations. It is so richly unified
that most people in our 20th century have begun to study it very
carefully as a corrective to our highly specialized alphabet. One
of the results of the use of the phonetic alphabet was that Euclid
could indicate the properties of visual space in his geometry.
Visual space, unlike any other of the sensory stasis, visual stasis
(?) is pretty well taken care of by Euclid, who explored most of its
dimensions. You've heard of non-Euclidian geometries. Well, in
the electric age, the non-Euclidian geometries have come back
and Euclid has been put aside. But with the arrival of Euclid and
visual space, you got a very strange possibility which Plato seized
upon and Plato developed his highly systematized philosophy,
even more systematized later by Aristotle, his philosophy of the
ideas and the idea of rational control of the passions and of the
world of nature.
Now this platonic universe of abstract truth and abstract
ideas is inconceivable without the phonetic alphabet. This
alphabet gave people some very strange habits too. It filled
people with the idea of imperial domination. Western man with
his alphabet has always felt it mandatory that he impose it upon
all other people. He must spread civilization by spreading literacy
in all directions. Now the Romans were the great implementers
of this technology. They seized upon this form of writing to codify
their laws and to make them uniformly applicable to all men. The
idea that civilization, meaning a visually organized set of rules
and laws for men in general, the idea that such a thing should be
spread to all nations coincided with the rise of Christianity. As far
as I know, Christianity has exactly nothing to do with the
Greco-Roman idea of civilization. And so it is very mysterious
that Christianity should have undertaken the job of spreading the
Greco-Roman alphabet. At the present time, the church is very
doubtful about the matter of spreading Greco-Roman ideas any
further than they've gone and the Third World doesn't want
them. The Third World doesn't want Greco-Roman Hellenistic
institutions. The Third World being the non-literate world.
So it's helpful to know the origins of the alphabet and of
civilization and rationality in that sense because we have come, in
the 20th century, to the end of that road. And it's a considerable
revolution to have been through 2500 years of phonetic literacy,
only to encounter the end of the road. Right now, people in this
room are making the decision whether or not we're going to have
any more literacy or any more civilization in the 20th century, or
whether it's going to stop right here.
One of the strange implications of the phonetic alphabet is
private identity. Before literacy, before phonetic literacy, there
had been no private identity. There had only been the tribal
group. Homer knows nothing about private identity, Homer's
world of the acoustic epic, the tribal encyclopedia of memorized
wisdom, which Eric Havelock has reported so ably in his Preface
to Plato, the Homeric epics were part of this acoustic wisdom that
preceded literacy and which were phased out by literacy. Homer
was wiped out by literacy. Homer had been the educational
establishment of the Greeks for centuries. An educated Greek
was one who had memorized Homer, who could sing it to his
guitar or harp, and perform it in public. He was a gentleman and
a free man. Along came the phonetic alphabet and Plato seized
upon it and said: Let us abandon Homer and go for rational
education. Plato's war on the poets was not a war on poetry, but a
war on the oral tradition of education. Now today everyone in this
room is being subjected to a new form of oral education. Literacy
is still officially the educational establishment, but unofficially the
oral forms are coming up very fast. This is the meaning of rock.
It is a kind of education based upon oral tradition, an acoustic
experience which is quite strangely remote from literacy. I will be
glad to come back to the whole problem of rock and its relation to
the modern city and the modern society. It's a very big subject
and it is not very much studied. But rock is not something that is
merely stuck onto the entertainment card as an extra item. Rock
is a kind of central oral form of education which threatens the
whole educational establishment. If Homer was wiped out by
literacy, literacy can be wiped out by rock. We're playing playing
the old story backwards, but you should know what the stakes
are. The stakes are are civilization and versus tribalism and
groupism, private identity versus corporate identity, and private
responsibility versus the group or tribal mandate. Now this
naturally is going to affect our political life and I'll come onto that
shortly.
This is really just by way of an opening theme. I want to
mention by way of explaining my own approach to these matters,
that my kind of study in communication is really a study of
transformation. Whereas information theory and all the existing
theories of communication that I know of are theories of
transportation. All the official theories of communication studied
in the schools of North America are theories of how you move
data from point A to point B to point C with minimal distortion.
That is not what I study at all. Information theory I understand
and I use, but information theory is a theory of transportation
and it has nothing to do with the effects which these forms have
on you. It's like a railway train concerned with moving goods
along a track. The track may be blocked, may be interfered with.
The problem in the transportation theory of communication is to
get the noise, get the interference off the track and let it go
through. Many educators think that the problem in education is
just to get the information through, get it past the barrier, the
opposition of the young, just to move it, move it, keep it going. I
have no interest much in that theory.
My theory, or concern, is with what do these media do to the
people who use them? What did writing do to the people who
invented it and used it? What do the other media of our time do
to the people who use it? So mine is a transformation theory.
How people are changed by the instruments they employ.
One of the peculiar flips that's goes with the change from the
acoustic or the visual to the acoustic is a change in joke styles.
I'm going to tell you a couple of old-fashioned jokes to show you
what I mean. A friend of mine went to Kennedy Airport a few
months ago to get a pick pick up an Irishman who was coming
into New York. And on the way in from the airport, the Irishman
was enjoying the advertising as he went along. And he was
especially attracted by a sign which read: Be Younger, Use
Ex-lax. And he said: How about that, he said. He said: What is
Ex-lax? And his friend said: We're coming to a drugstore right
now, I'm going to get you some. And he popped in and brought
out a cake of Ex-lax, which the Irishman received and gobbled it
down in toto. And with relish. And about a half an hour later, his
friend said: Are you feeling any younger? And the Irishman says:
Well, I'm not sure, but I've just done something very foolish. I
think he said childish. Now that's an old-fashioned joke. It's got a
story line.
Another one on that pattern concerns a a Newfoundland chap
who was sitting in an airport waiting for a plane. And he was
sitting beside another man who he gradually spoke to. Airports
are arranged so that you do not speak to anyone. That is, the
chairs are arranged so that you won't be tempted to even notice
anybody around you. This is a carefully arranged ploy. Anyway
he spoke to this man and he said: What do you do? And the
Newfoundlander said: I'm a rancher. I have 40 acres in
Newfoundland and I grow a great variety of things there and it's
a it keeps me very busy. And he said then in turn: What do you
do? And the Texan, who was the other chap, said: I'm a rancher
too. And the Newfoundlander said: How big is your ranch? Well,
said the Texan, if we got in my car about now and drove til
sunset, we'd still be on my ranch. And the Newfie said: Well, you
know I had a car like that once. Now that's the old style.
The one-liner joke, which has taken the place of the story
line, has no plot at all. It's instantaneous: easy glum, easy glow.
That's the whole thing. Easy glum, easy glow. Or: I may be crazy
but I'm not far from it. That's all the attention span that you're
supposed to have anymore. If Nixon had been the captain of the
Titanic, what would what would he have said to the passengers?
He would have said: Ladies and gentlemen, we're stopping for
ice.
Well, these are one-liners. The British Empire is the empire
on which the sun never sets because you cannot trust an
Englishman in the dark. One-liners are everywhere and they
have taken the place of the old story line. Story line goes, and by
the way the same way with music - melody has given place to the
new rock forms. Instead of the tune which goes on and on, you
have simply the broken and fragmented harmonics and
juxtapositions of rhythm. Abstract music. Abstract art, abstract
music is an art in which you pull out the connections. I understand
that you're going to have a sculpture by Picasso on this campus.
And abstract sculpture, or abstract art, is an art in which there is
no visual component. All you have is the acoustic, tactile, kinetic
form. Corbusier, the great architect, said: Architecture is best
appreciated at night in the dark, where you can feel the thrust
and the forces at work in the building. This is not visual.
Now cubism, cubism is an art form in which you are given
simultaneously the underneath, the outside, the top and the
bottom of an object. Giving it simultaneously in one level. To
have all sides simultaneously is not visual. It is acoustic and
tactile. So abstract art is an art in which they have pulled out the
visual connections. And that began about 1900. It's about the
same time that the physicists pulled out the connections in
matter. Quantum Mechanics 1900 - Max Planch pulled out all the
connections that mattered and gave us quantum theory. Quantum
theory is simply physics minus the connections. And it's quite
easily understood, even by scientists. But don't think they don't
have their troubles because one of the problems of western
visual man is that he tries to translate everything into visual
terms. It is very difficult for a western man to take things except
in a visual, connected, rational mode. Modern physicists report
all their findings in Newtonian terms, which are the old-fashioned
visual language. One of the peculiarities of modern physics is it
still uses the old Newtonian language. Newton was all visual.
Everything was classified, connected, continuous. Modern
physics has many troubles with the visual problem and the
acoustic problem. And they don't know whether, for example, to
have a particle theory or a wave theory of matter. And a particle
theory of matter tends to be visual and a wave theory tends to be
kinetic. But modern physics is divided into the different sensory
modes of man. And many members in the top physics world are
quite unable to understand some of the visual aspects or the
non-visual aspects of their own field. They're very good at
maintaining the general decorum and the conventional
respectability of their ... their clan, but in fact they are divided by
severe strife within.
Speaking of the flips, there's a story that exists somewhere
between the story line and the one- liner is the Norman Mailer
story at Berkeley. A few months ago, he was addressing a
women's lib group and he said to them: Everybody in this hall
who regards me as a mail chauvinist pig, hiss. And they all hissed
very loudly. And he turned to the chairman and he said: Obedient
little bitches, aren't they? Well, this brings up, you might ask,
there are two things that raises -- the new journalism versus the
old, and women's lib. The old journalism used to try to give an
objective picture of a situation by giving the pro and the con.
Objective journalism meant giving both sides at once. It was
strangely assumed that there were two sides to every face. It
never occurred to them there might be 40 sides, or a thousand
sides. No. Two sides: pro and con. And suddenly this form of
journalism disappeared and the new journalism popped in,
represented by Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and many
others, Tom Wolfe. The new journalism doesn't give you any
side. It just immerses you in the feeling of the whole situation. So
it just plunges you into the feeling of being at the convention, or
being at the fire, being somewhere. And it began with that famous
phrase: Something funny happened on the way to the Forum. A
happening is not a point of view. A happening is all sides at once
and everybody involved in it. Mardi Gras is a happening. You
cannot have objective journalism about Mardi Gras. You just
have to immerse. Well, Mailer was one of the authors of the new
journalism of immersion without any point of view. No objectivity,
just subjectivity, and he subheaded his Armies of the Night:
fiction as history, history as fiction. So the new journalism, quite
frankly, regards itself as a form of fiction, not objectivity at all.
I think you'll find that new politics is in the same position.
The old politics had parties, policies, planks, opposition. The new
politics has is concerned only with images. The problem in the
new politics is to find the right image. So search committees are
formed to find the candidates who have the right image. Man
hunting has become a great big business, both in the military
world and in the commercial world and the political world. Image
hunting is the new thing, and policies no longer matter because
whether your electric light is provided by Republicans or
Democrats is rather unimportant compared to the service of light
and power and all the other kinds of services that go with our
cities. Service environment's the thing in place of political
policies. Or so it seems. Now remember I should always add in
anything I say that that is the way it seems at the moment.
Now the the Mailer thing a propos of women's lib has this
rather large implication. Women's lib is not like the old
suffragette thing about votes for women. Women's lib is not an
attempt to find a better and more just set-up for women to be
employed in. Women's lib concerns a tremendous change that's
taking place in the entire nature of work. Just as education has
undergone strange changes, so has work. The Japanese Sony
plant years ago developed a system whereby all the workers
could bring their children to the plant and send them to school. If
they were infants, there was daycare, and if they were school
age, they went to school. The Sony plant in Tokyo educated not
only the children but educated them at university level and any of
the workers who wanted could also go to university. The plant
became itself a kind of a playground and learning and play and
work became one thing. Now that isn't too hard to do in Japan
because they are a tribal people and live according to family
rules. Nobody ever got fired from a Japanese plant. He's part of
the family. Now this tribalism which they take for granted is
something that they're now trying to get rid of and is something
toward which we tend to be moving.
But at present in our own world of work, jobs are giving place
to role playing. Job holding is giving way to role playing because,
at electric speed, it is impossible to specialize. This is one of the
problems in education. Subjects become very very dubious as a
form of learning. The interdisciplinary takes on more and more
meaning. Media study is interdisciplinary study. Isolated
subjects in the curriculum have become almost a menace to
education. But in the same way, the specialized job has become
impossible in a big plant or in a big business of any sort. It is
more and more necessary to know the overall pattern of the
operation. In these Japanese plants like the Sony plants, the
workers were consulted upon the kinds of innovation, the kinds
of products they would make, on any new developments in the
manufacturing process, and they were also consulted on the
pricing and marketing of all these products. And that meant
everybody in the plant was consulted ... somebody. There was
total participation on the part of the workers in that whole
operation.
The Japanese today are introducing western literacy into
their own culture, are spending $6 billion at the present moment
in Japan to get rid of their own alphabet and put in our alphabet.
Little do they know what is going to happen to them or to us as a
result. But the alphabetic man is a very aggressive man, and a
very specialized man. So the Japanese world is likely to manifest
enormous increase of energy and aggression when they get our
alphabet installed. It will also wipe out their whole culture. Scrub
it right off. That is their own phonetic or rather ideogramic forms
of writing and culture will be destroyed. Now if China follows the
same course, and it appears to be about to do that, then the
transformation of the Chinese world would be very rapid. In 20
years, they will flip out of their culture, wipe out their whole
ancient culture in 20 years, and become incredibly aggressive
and specialized and goal-oriented because the specialist man
always has a goal. The visual man has a goal in life. The ear man
never has a goal. He just wants to do his thing wherever he is. So
if the Chinese, or the Japanese were to take on our alphabet
seriously, they would be in great trouble and we would be too. I
don't think they understand what's involved.
Now apropos women's lib, the electric world, because it does
not favour specialism, does favour women. Men are naturally
specialists compared to women. Men are very brittle and
unadaptable people compared to women. Women have had
through the centuries to adapt to men, rather than vice versa. So
specializing, which used to be taken for granted in modern
industry, has now become very very shaky, and role playing has
taken over from job holding in big business. Role playing means
having several jobs simultaneously, or being able to move rapidly
from one job to another. A man, a good actor, can play many
parts. So women's lib is really a reply to the new electric
conditions of employment in which huge information is available
simultaneously to everybody. In the electric world, the
simultaneity of information is acoustic in the form that it comes
from all directions at once. You hear it from all directions at once.
Electric information comes from all directions at once and when
information comes from all directions simultaneously, you are
living in an acoustic world. It doesn't matter whether you're
listening or not, the fact is you're getting this acoustic pattern.
Now when people become acoustically affected, they no
longer have goals. They settle down to role playing. Some of you
may have seen this show called Upstairs Downstairs on Sunday
nights in which you you go down to the servants' quarters.
Upstairs is the Forsythe Saga, downstairs the servants. In the
servants' quarters, people are playing roles. Upstairs, in the
Forsythe world of literacy, they are pursuing goals. Downstairs in
the servants' quarters in England, the servants had no goals.
They just had a role, which was static. But it's very dramatic,
very involving, and very fulfilling.
Now role playing is a very different thing from goal seeking
and in the electric time, we are moving very much in that
direction. The reason that most of you in this room find it difficult
to imagine a goal in life is simply that you're living in an electric
world where everything happens at once. It's hard to have a fixed
point of view in a world where everything is happening
simultaneously. It is hard to have an objective in a world that is
changing faster than you can imagine the objective to be fulfilled.
Women's lib, therefore, has very deep roots in the new
technology and is not just a matter of votes for women. It means
that the work that is being performed by men today can in many
cases be done better by women.
Another strange effect of this electric environment is the
total absence of secrecy. What Nixon refers to as the
confidentiality of his role and position is no longer feasible. No
form of secrecy is possible at electric speed, whether in the
patent world, in the fashion world, or the political world. The
pattern sticks out a mile before anybody says anything about it.
At electric speed, everything becomes x-ray. So Watergate is
simply a nice parable or example of how secrecy was flipped into
show business. The back room boys suddenly found themselves
on the stage. Political support for election purposes and so on
ceases to be possibly confidential or quiet or secret and there's
no way of having any form of secrecy in this matters. With the
end of secrecy goes the end of monopolies of knowledge. There
can no longer be a monopoly of knowledge in learning, education,
or in power.
Now this, I'm not making value judgments. This would seem
to many people a very good thing, and it may well be a very good
thing. I'm simply specifying the pattern or the form that occurs
when you have instant speed of electric information. You cannot
have a monopoly of knowledge such as most learned people had
a few years. You cannot have it under electric conditions. This
applies to all professional life, as well as to private life.
Ivan Illich has a book called Deschooling Society in which he
argues that since we now live in a world where the information
and answers are all outside the school room, let us close the
schools. Why spend the child's time inside the school giving him
answers that already exist outside? It's a good question, but his
answer or suggestion of closing the schools is somewhat
unnecessary because it is now possible, instead of putting the
answers inside the school, to put the questions inside.
This might be a good time to mention a little scheme I have
for what I call organized ignorance. I've often been puzzled by the
fact that the greatest discoveries in the world, when you look
back, are perfectly easy. They can be put in a textbook. But the
same discovery when you were looking forward at a problem,
impossible. Why is knowledge so easy backwards and so hard
forwards? Well, it's obvious that this is true because there isn't
anything that has been discovered that can't be taught quite
easily. Why is it so hard to discover? Well, at first I thought:
Suppose the cancer experts came to the studio with their
problem, set up a model of their experiments and their
procedures in studying cancer, and said: We have got to this
point and we cannot get any further. They'd broadcast that to a
million people at once. It is obvious that there'd be one person in
a million who would see there was no problem at all. In any
problem whatever, one in a million would see no problem. The
real problem is: how do you reach this guy who sees the absence
of the problem?
Now let's ask another question: Why is it that the man, one in
a million, says there is no problem? This person is inevitably and
naturally untaught, ignorant of all scientific procedures at all
times. The scientist has great trouble looking forward past his
problem because his knowledge gets in the way. It is only the
very ignorant person who can get past that problem because he is
not fogged over by knowledge. When you're looking for new
answers to new questions, it is knowledge itself that blocks
progress. It is knowledge that creates real ignorance, just as
wealth creates poverty. Knowledge creates ignorance. Every
time a new discovery is made, enormous new areas of ignorance
are opened up.
One of the greatest human discoveries, the automatic
cybernetic governor on the steam engine, was made by an eight
year old boy who had the job of pulling the steam cock and every
time the big wheel went around, he pulled the steam cock to let
the steam out. He wanted to play marbles. He tried the string to
the wheel and made one of the greatest inventions of all human
history. Now the engineers who made the steam engine could not
possibly have seen this simple gimmick. Only an ignorant kid
who wanted to play marbles could see such things. Now the
greatest discoveries in human history are of that kind.
Another strange circumstance attending all discovery and all
all investigation is this: The effects come before the causes.
Without any exception, in every given development, in every
discovery, all the effects come before the cause or the discovery
itself. So when the discovery is finally made, everybody says:
Well, anybody could have seen that. The time was right. So about
the time somebody discovers the telephone, there are a thousand
people who invent the telephone. And then the law courts are
filled with suits for generations |
