Is It Natural That One Medium Should Appropriate and Exploit Another?

Marshall McLuhan

[Essay from McLuhan: Hot and Cool, ed. George Stearn (1967)]

Why have the effects of media, whether speech, writing, photography or radio, been overlooked by social observers through the past 3500 years of the Western world? The answer to that question, we shall see, is in the power of the media_ themselves to impose their own assumptions upon our modes of perception. Our

media have always constituted the parameters and the framework for the~objec tives of our Western world. But the assumptions and parameters projected by the structures of the media on and through our sensibilities have long constituted the overall patterns of private and group association in the West. The same structur ing of the forms of human association by various media is also true of the nonñWestern world, and of the lives of preñliterate and archaic man as well. The difference is that in the West our media technologies from script to print, and from Gutenberg to Marconi, have been highly specialized. Specialism creates not stability and equilibrium, but change and trauma, as one segment of experience usurps and overlays the others in aggressive, brawling sequence and cycle.

All that ends now in the electronic age, whose media substitute allñatñonce ness for oneñthingñatñañtimeness. The movement of informat~on at approx~mately the speed of light has become by far the largest industry of the world. The con sumption of this information has become correspondingly the largest consumer function in the world. The globe has become on one hand a community of learn ing, and at the same time, with regard to the tightness of its interrelationships, the globe has become a tiny village. Patterns of human association based on slower media have become overnight not only irrelevant and obsolete, but a threat to continued existence and to sanity. In these circumstances understanding media must mean the understanding of the effects of media. The objectives of new media have tended, fatally, to be set in terms of the parameters and frames of older media. All media testing has been done within the parameters of older mediaóespecially of speech and print.

Today in topñmanagement study and planning, assumptions and objectives are recognized to be distinct entities. Let me quote from a Westinghouse "Long Range Planning" brief of August 3, 1960:

Now it is imperative that whenever there is a change so that actual developments

do not coincide with your assumptions, you must change your assumptions and

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you must change any plans that were based on the assumption that has now turned out to be erroneous.... It is absolutely imperative that you must know what your assumptions are, and that you must recognize that things are not going to develop in the future in accordance with your assumptions.... Now, the pri mary difference between an assumption and an objective is that an assumption pertains to things that are beyond your control, and an objective pertains to things that are achieved through your own effort.

What the writer of this brief does not know is that assumptions can also come within the range of prediction and control just as soon as it is recognized that the new media of communication in any age, as they penetrate and transform the older media, are the source of new assumptions and consequently the causes of change in our objectives.

The study of media constituents and content can never reveal these dynamics of media effects. Media study has lagged behind all other fields in this century, even behind economics, as the following quotation from W. W. Rostow's The Stages of Economic Growth (Boston: Cambridge University Press, 1960, page 90) will show:

The argument of this book has been that once man conceived of his physical envi ronment as subject to knowable, consistent laws, he began to manipulate it to his economic advantage; and once it was demonstrated that growth was possible, the consequences of growth and modernization, notably its military consequences, unhinged one traditional society after another, pushed it into the treacherous period of preconditions, from which many, but not all of the woHd's societies have

now emerged into selfñsustained growth through the takeñoffmechanism

Media study has not begun to approach the awareness of this "takeñoff mecha nism" of social change involved in the shaping and speeding of information for eye and for ear and for touch and kinetics.

Our project set out to bring media study within the range of the expanding awareness here indicated by Rostow in economics. My assumptions, then, were:

(a) that nothing had yet been done to bring understanding to the effects of media in patterning human association,

(b) that such understanding was quite possible; media assumptions do not have to remain subliminal,

(c) that the absence of such understanding was eloquent testimony to the

power of media to anesthetize those very modes of awareness in which

they were most operative.

My objectives were:

(a) to explain the character of a dozen media, illustrating the dynamic symmetries of their operation on man and society,

(b) to do this in a syllabus usable in secondary schools. (Secondary schools were chosen as offering students who had not in their own lives become aware of any vested interest in acquired knowledge. They have very great experience of media, but no habits of observation or critical awareness. Yet they are the best teachers of media to teachers, who are otherwise unreachable.)

1. What would be the problems of introducing the phonetic alphabet today into Japan and China?

2. Would the consequences of introducing the phonetic alphabet into China today be as drastic as when the Romans introduced the same alphabet to Gaul?

3. Will the ideogram survive in some new roles in the same way that the printed book finds new work to do in the electronic age?

4. What are some of the advantages of the ideogram over our alphabet?

5. Does a form of writing which involves complex situations at a single glance favor cultural continuity and stability?

6. By contrast, does a form of writing that favors attention to oneñthingñatñatime foster instability and change?

7. In other words, is the man of the ear a conservative, and the man of the eye a liberal?

8. Why should writing weaken the human memory? Preñliterate man, amazed at the efforts of the white man to write down his thoughts and sayings, asks: "Why do you write; can you not remember?"

9. Why should a preñliterate people have no concept of words as referring to things, but only of words as being things?

10. Is the "content" of writing the medium of speech? Is it possible for any medium to have a content except it be another medium?

11. Is the medium the message?

12. Is is possible for a mathematical proposition or demonstration to have content?

1. Let us try to discover any area of human action or knowledge unaffected by the forms and pressures of print during the past five centuries.

2. If the forms of print have shaped all the levels of action and organization in

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the Western world up until the advent of nuclear technology, does this explain and justify the type of stress which we allow to our printed forms in the educational establishment?

3. If a nuclear technology is now succeeding the mechanical print technology of the past five centuries, what problems does such a transition present to the educator? To the political establishment? To the legal establishment?

4. What would happen to the society that did not recognize or identify these problems at all?

5. What happened to medieval education when it failed to understand the nature of print?

6. Consider why anthropology with its preñliterate concerns should have so much in common with postñliterate and nuclear forms of communication?

7. How did the uniformity and repeatability of the print production process

affect human arrangements in time and in space?

8. Why should the speeding of information flow for the print reader create hist~ torical perspective and background? Why should the much slower informaIvR~> tion flow of the manuscript make such background impossible?

9. Why should the electronic speed of information flow eliminate historical background in favor of "you are there"?

10. Why is homogeneity of space and time arrangement natural under print conditions of learning?

11. Why was it revolutionary for Columbus to assume that he could keep moving in a straight line, in one direction? Why are there no straight lines in medieval maps? Why was it unthinkable for them that space should be continuous and homogeneous?

12. Why should the Columbus pursuit of the straight line in navigation have been necessary in order to discover the round earth?

13. Are the flatñearthers on strong ground in terms of our Western devotion to Euclidean space?

14. In garmentñmaking and hence in clothing styles, the straight seam was impossible before the sewing machine. Trace some of the implications of the straight line and of mechanism in one or more other fields of human organization.

15. How much is our notion of "content" affected in the case of printing by the blank page as filled with moveable type?

1. Does the aspect of newspaper as inclusive image of the community commit the newspaper to the job of exposing private manipulation of the communal thing? Is there an inevitable clash between the public nature and function of a newspaper and the private points of view of many of the interests in a community?

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2. Consider the same news story as handled on radio and television, and in the newspaper. Do you think any one of these ways of handling the news especially adapted to any particular kind of news? Does world news, for example, seem most appropriate in headline form? Does local news fnd its most appropriate form on the radio?

3. Which mediumópress, radio, or televisionóis most effective in gaining the participation of the viewer? Does the newspaper reader tend to be a mere spectator of events? Is the radio listener more closely involved? Is the television viewer most challenged to participate in action?

4. Does the newspaper typically create the outlook of the sidewalk superintendent in all community matters?

5. Is the job of the newspaper to dramatize the issues within a community?

6. How did the news photograph alter the nature of the newspaper and the news story?

7. How had the print affected the nature of news coverage prior to the photograph? (See Ivins' Print and Visual Communication.)

8. Has the influence of radio and television been to encourage newspapers to a more editorial attitude to the news? If news can be given by radio and television, does the newspaper see its unique advantage to consist in background to the news?

9. Why should the newspaper find so little sympathy with historical perspective on any matter? (See Time magazine as a newspaper trying to achieve historical perspective.)

10. What devices does a newspaper employ to provide a sense of continuity from day to day for its readership?

11. Why should the newspaper, in processing opinion in such ways as to produce homogeneous emotions and attitudes, be a major means of mobilizing the manpower resources of a nation?

1. How would a speedñup of information movement to telephone dimension

affect the pattern of authority and of decisionñmaking?

2. Ask your friends and parents how the telephone shapes their business and social lives.

3. What, for example, is the effect of the telephone in medical practice? In political life?

4. What has been the role of the telephone in the newspaper world?

5. Consider the way in which the telephone is used in Broadway plays, or in Hollywood movies, as indication of its real force and character.

6. What qualities of drama and action come to mind in relating the telephone to stage and movie and novel?

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7. Is it natural that one medium should appropriate and exploit another?

8. Is the use one medium makes of another the clearest testimony to its nature?

9. Why is the telephone so irresistibly intrusive?

10. Why do Europeans and especially English people particularly resent the telephone?

11. Why does an Englishman prefer to manage his appointments by telegraph and postcard rather than personñtoñperson telephone calls?

12. Why is it difficult to exercise delegated authority in a world supplied with telephones?

13. Is the telephone extremely demanding of individual attention?

14. Is it abrupt, intrusive, and indifferent to human concerns?

15. How does the telephone affect the typewriter? Does it enormously speed up and increase the role of the typewriter? Check this question with the book Parkinson's Law by C. Northcote Parkinson.

1. In view of the various cultural backgrounds of England, France, America, Russia, India, and Japan, what qualities would you expect to appear most in the movies made in these countries?

2. In his Film As Art, Rudolph Arnheim for example says that the American filmñmaker excels in the single shot; the Russian in montage. Why should this be?

3. Why should the European and the Russian and the Japanese have regarded the film as an art form from the first? Why should the Englishñspeaking world have such difficulty in seeing popular forms of entertainment as art forms whether the movie, the comic strip, or the common advertisement?

4. How did movies sell the American way of life to the backward countries of the globe? Consider the role of uniformity and repeatability as indispensable to competition and rivalry. How could competition thrive where unique expression and achievement are stressed?

5. Was the picture story borrowed from the cartoon world?

6. Is there any hookñup between magazine picture stories and silent movies? If so, is it in the isolation of one emotion at a time?

7. Magazines like the Saturday Evening Post have discovered that idea articles, written like movie scenarios shot by shot, sell better than short stories. Check the technique of such articles.

1. What was the effect of the radio on movies? On newspapers? On magazines?

On language? On the concept of time?

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2. How do P.A. systems relate to radio?

3. Does the P.A. system affect the visual as well?

4. What changes occurred in radio listening and programming after television?

5. Why is radio so intensely visual in effect?

6. What was the relation of radio to the rise of Fascism, politically and psychologically?

7. Why should radio exert such force among the preñliterate and the semiliterate?

8. What was the overall effect of radio among highly literate people?

9. Why does the twelveñyearñold tend to turn from the television set to radio?

TELEVISION

1. Engineers claim that a thousandñline television image would provide almost as high definition as the present movie image. Supposing that an equally high definition of retinal impression were achieved for television, what would be the effect of its multiñpoint mosaic structure over and above the retinal impression?

2. Why should the broken line of the television mosaic emphasize the sculptural contours of objects?

3. Why has sculpture traditionally been spoken of as the voice of silence? Does this mean that the sculptural object exists on the frontier between sight and sound?

4. Is there any possible line of investigation suggested by the fact that sound waves become visible on the wings of jet planes just before they break the sound barrier? Does this suggest that the various human senses are translatable one into the other at various intensities?

5. If sculpture exists on the frontier between sight and sound, does this mean that beyond that frontier is writing and architecture and enclosed or pictorial space? In a word, must the nuclear age civilize those primitive dimensions from which we emerged by means of writing and the visual organization of experience? Can this be done without mere destruction both of the primitive and of the~iyilized achievement?

Consider the power of any medium to impose its own spatial assumptions and structures. Extend your observations to discriminate and distinguish between the kinds of space evoked and constituted by the film on one hand, television on the other.

Communication, creativity, and growth occur together or they do not occur at all. New technology creating new basic assumptions at all levels for all

enterprises is wholly destructive if new objectives are not orchestrated with the new technological motifs.

Dr. James E. Russell, of the National Education Association's Educational Policies Committee, commenting on my paper "The New Media and the New Education," felt that I had not included consideration of the computer's effect:

What I had in mind is the new dimension forced on education by the existence of

computers and teaching machines. This runs at a much deeper level than the

distinction between print and nonprint communications. It has to do with a new

concept of the nature of thought.... All rational propositions can be reduced to

binomial terms.

As Tobias Dantzig revealed in his book on Numl~er, primitive, preñdigital counting was binomial. Postñdigital computation returns to the preñdigital just as postñliterate education returns to the dialogue. However, what the computer means in education is this. As information movement speeds up, information levels rise in all areas of mind and society, and the result is that any sublect of knowledge becomes substitutable for any other subject. That is to say, any and all curricula are obsolete with regard to subject matter. All that remains to study are the media themselves, as forms, as modes ever creating new assumptions and hence new objectives.

This basic change has already occurred in science and industry. Almost any natural resource has, with the rise in information levels, become substitutable for any other. In the order of knowledge this fact has given rise to Operations Research, in which any kind of problem can be tackled by nonspecialists. The technique is to work backward from effect or result to cause, not from cause to effect. This situation resulting from instantaneous information movement was referred to by A. N. Whitehead in Science and the Modern World, when he pointed out that the great discovery of the later nineteenth century was not the invention of this or that, but the discovery of the technique of discovery. We can discover anything we decide to discover.

In education this means the end of the oneñway passing along of knowledge to students. For they already live in a "field" of knowledge created by new media which, though different in kind, is yet far richer and more complex than any ever taught via traditional curricula. The situation is comparable to the difference between the complexity of a language versus the crudities of traditional grammars used to bring languages under the rule of written forms. Until we have mastered the mutuple grammars of the new nonwritten media, we shall have no curriculum relevant to the new languages of knowledge and communication which have come into existence via the new media These new languages are known to most people but their grammars are not known at all. We have "read" these new languages in the light of the old. The result has been distortion of their character and blindness to their meaning and effects.

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NonñEuclidean space, and the dissolution of our entire Western fabric of perception, results from electric modes of moving information. This revolution involves us willyñnilly in the study of modes and media as forms that shape and reshape our perceptions. That is what I have meant all along by saying the "medium is the message," for the medium determines the modes of perception and the matrix of assumptions within which objectives are set.

All of my recommendations, therefore, can be reduced to this one: Study the modes of the media, in order to hoick all assumptions out of the subliminal, nonverbal realm for scrutiny and for prediction and control of human purposes.

Such a program can most readily be instituted today at the level of secondary education.

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