Transcription
Uh, one of the big flips that's taking place in our time is the changeover from the eye to the ear. Most of us, having grown up in a 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, 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 a while—say, from the 16th century anyway—the visual world has the properties of being a sort of continuous and connected and homogeneous; all parts more or less alike and static; things stay 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 very big shift; it's it's the same shift that Alice in Wonderland made, to know, when she went through the Looking Glass. She moved out of the visual world 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. I'm going to try to tie it in 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 Greek or Roman Hellenistic world. And about 500 BC, 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 slipped 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 phonetic alphabet has really its origins are by no means clear at 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, uh, has a very peculiar structure; it is made up of whole names, 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 of 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 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, was 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 spaces, visual space is pretty well taken care of by Euclid, who explored most of its dimensions. You've heard of non-Euclidean geometries. Well, in the electric age, the non-Euclidean geometries have come back, and Euclid has been put aside. But with the arrival of Euclid and visual space, you've 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 patients 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 imposed 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. But 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 Greek or Roman idea of civilization, and so it is very mysterious that Christianity should have undertaken the job of spreading Greek or Roman alphabet. At the present time, the church is very doubtful about the matter of spreading Greek or Roman ideas any further than they've gone, and the third world doesn't want them; the third world doesn't want Greek or 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 to rationality of 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. The 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 has reported so palpably 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 off 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 pre-med. Along came the phonetic alphabet, and it said, at 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. Okay, this is the meaning of rock; it is a kind of education based upon an oral tradition, an acoustic experience which is quite strangely remote from literacy. I will begin to come back to the whole problem of rock in 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 and you the entertainment card as an extra item; rock is a kind of central oral form of education which threatens the whole educational establishment. If uh, Homer was wiped out by literacy, literacy can be wiped out by rock. We're playing we're playing though the old story backwards, but you should know what the stakes are. The stakes are like our civilization and uh versus tribalism and uh groupism, a private identity versus corporate identity, and private responsibility versus the group or tribal mandate. Now, this naturally is going to affect our political life; I'll come on to that shortly. This is really just by way of a an opening theme.
I want to mention, by way of explaining my own approach to these matters, that my kind of study and 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 that 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, and the track may be blocked, maybe interfered with. The problem in communication, transportation theory of communication, is to get the noise, get the interference off the track, 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 desk to move and move it and 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 employed, and I wish there were a lot more people in this field that I mentioned, look, transformation, but there are extremely few, and in fact, I would be embarrassed to mention more than two or three.
One of the peculiar flips that 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 pickup, 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, "What is Ex-Lax?" And his friend said, "We're coming to a drugstore right now, and got to get us up," and he popped in and brought out a cake of Ex-Lax, which the Irishman proceeded to chomp 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," Adam at the theaters, I think he said, "childish." Now, that's an old-fashioned joke; it's got a storyline. Another one of the on that pattern, it concerns a a Newfoundland chap 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 anybody; that is, the chairs are arranged so that you won't be tempted to even notice anybody around her; this is a carefully arranged plot; they um, anyway, he spoke to this man, and he said, "What do you do?" When the the Newfoundland who said, "I'm a rancher; I have 40 acres in Newfoundland, and I grow a great variety of things there, and uh, 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 Newfoundland who said, "How big is your ranch?" Well, said the Texan, "If we got in my car about now and drove till sunset, we'd still be on my ranch." And the new he said, "Well, you know, I had a car like that once." Um, well, that's the old stock.
The one-liner joke which has taken the place of the storyline 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. You know that that if Nixon had been the captain of the Titanic Republic, what what he have said to the passengers? They would have said that, "Ladies and gentlemen, we're stopping for ice." [Applause] Oh, these are one-liners. "The British Empire is the empire in which the Sun never sets because you cannot trust an Englishman in the darkness." One-liners are everywhere, and they have taken the four place of the old storyline. Storyline goes by the way in the same way with in music; melody has given place to the new rock forms. Instead of a tune which goes on and on, you have simply the broken uh and fragmented harmonics and juxtapositions of rhythm. Abstract fusion, abstract art, abstract music is an art in which you pull out the connections. I understand that you're going to have a sculptor by Picasso on this campus, and abstract sculptor or abstract art is an art in which there is no visual component; all you have is the acoustic, tactile, kinetic form. Le 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 visually. 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 was about the same time that the physicists pulled out the connections in matter; quantum mechanics, 1900, Max Planck pulled out all the connections in matter and gave us quantum theory. Quantum theory is simply physics minus the connections, and uh, it's so 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, null. 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 visery; everything was a classified, connected, continuous. Modern physics is in has many troubles with the visual problem and the acoustic problem, and the 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 sensory, different sensory modes of men, and many members of 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 decor and the conventional respectability of their clap of their clan, but in fact, they are divided by severe strife within.
Speaking of the flips, that's a story that exists somewhere between the storyline and the one-liner is the Norman Mailer story at Berkeley a few months ago. He was addressing a women's lib group, and I don't know, he said to them, "Everybody in this hall who regards me as a male chauvinist pig, hiss," and they all hissed very loudly, and he turned to the chairman; he said, "Obedient little [ __ ] aren't they?" That would look like you're looking for; they don't think about it effects. Well, this brings up a perfect; you might ask, there are two things that that raises: the new journalism versus the old, and the 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 case; it never occurred there might be 40 sides or a thousand sides, no two sides, pro and from. 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 someone, and that's it. Began with that famous phrase, "Something funny happened all the way in the Forum." A happening is not a point of view; a happening is all sides at once and everybody involved in it. A Mardi Gras is a happening; you cannot have objective journalism about Mardi Gras; you just have to immerse. Well, ER 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, that not objectivity at all. I think you'll find the 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 like very big business, both in the military world and in the commercial world and the political world. Image hunting is the new thing, and not 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 environments have taken the place of political policies.
Remember, I should always add at anything I say that that is the way it seems at the moment. Now, the the Mailer thing, apropos 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, a more just set up for women to be employed. 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 in 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, is something towards which we tend to be moving. But at present in our own world of work, jobs are giving place to role play; job holding is giving giving way to role play 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, work, 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; not somebody; there was total participation on the part of the workers in the whole operation.
The Japanese today are introducing Western literacy into their own culture; are spending six billion dollars 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 ideographic forms of writing and culture will be destroyed. Now, if China follows the same course, it appears to be about to do that, then the transformation of the Chinese world would be very rapid; 20 years, they would flip out of their culture, wipe off 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 too. I don't think they understand what's involved. Yep.
Now, apropos women's lib, the electric world, because it does not favor specialism, does favor 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; of what's you hear from all directions at once. Electric information comes from all directions at once, and when the 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 into role play. Some of you may have seen this show I called Upstairs Downstairs on Sunday nights in which you you go down to the servants' quarters; upstairs is the foresight saga, downstairs the surface in the servants' quarters. People are playing roles; upstairs in the foresight world of literacy, they are pursuing goals; downstairs in the servants' quarters in England, the servants had no goals; they just had a room which was static, but it was very dramatic, very involving, and very fulfilling. Now, role play 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 being 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. That had 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 in the political world; the pattern sticks out a mile before anybody says anything about it. At electric speed, everything becomes x-rayed. 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; there's no way of having any form of secrecy in these 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 ago; you cannot have it under electric conditions. This applies to all professional life as well.
As to private life, I have an illage. He has a book called *Deschooling*, 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 as a problem, impossible. Why is knowledge so easy backwards and so hard forward? 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 it? Well, I first thought, suppose vix 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 broadcast that to a million people. Once it is obvious, 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 us ask another question: Why is it that the man, one in a million, says there is no problem? This person is inevitably unnaturally untaught, ignorant of all scientific procedures at all sides. 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 welts 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 a steam [__] and every time the big wheel went around he pulled the steam Gog to let the steam out. He wanted to play marbles; he tied 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 giving; only a 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 investigation is this: the effects come before the causes, without any exception, in every human development, in every discovery; all the effects come before the cause or the discovery itself. So, the one, the discovery has finally made, everybody says, "Well, anybody could have seen that the time was right." So, about the time somebody makes, discovers a telephone, there are a thousand people who invent the telephone, and then the Law Courts are filled with suits for Jeff for Generations. Darwin then Wallace discovered Evolution at the same time, without any personal acquaintance. But at the present time, one of the effects that has heaped up a mile high for which no cause has yet appeared, but a cause will shortly appear, one of the effects is anti-gravity. At the present time, we have an enormous amount of anti-gravitational effect and activity: helicopters, airplanes, astronauts, many things, but we don't have the cause; we just have the effects. Within our lifetimes, or your lifetimes, the cause of anti-gravity, a simple gimmick, will present itself, and all things will levitate instantly. The problem will be how to hold things down on the ground, but this, this is, this is obvious, as obvious as your being there or my being here. The effects are here; the causes will be here shortly.
The bicycle presented all the causes of the Motorcar; all the effects of the motor guard just before the motor car. The bicycle paved the way for the motor car; everything, the tires, changed the ball bearings; all the manufacturing problems are solved by the bicycle before the motor car was ever thought of. But the, the roads and the services all arrived first; the Motorcar arrived last. At the present moment, the voter card is on the way out, not because of oil shortage, but because of something quite different. The Motorcar has a vehicle had an annoyless function to perform in American Life; it provided the ultimate, the form of privacy and the means of going outside to be alone. North Americans are the only people in the world who go outside to be alone and inside to be with people. In every other country in the world, including the Eskimo world, people go outside to be with people and inside to be alone. Why did Americans ever hit upon this weird reverse pattern? Well, the answer is, is available. Americans came to this continent to subdue nature, fast and furious; they tamed it, they subdued it, they crushed it, they turned it into, into the enemy. So naturally, you can read about it in *Moby Dick* or in Hawthorne or any of our literature. Naturally, Americans who regard the outside as the enemy and the inside as the friend, whereas all the other continents of the world regard the outside as the brand on the inside as a place of hostility and for defense only. Doll doors are closed in the European house; the European family lives in seclusion and privacy inside; there is no privacy in the American home. That is why you have to get a grant if you want to study so you can leave home. But no, this is a weird pattern, and it's very important to understand it because it isn't over. The motor car providing this Superior, Superior means of going outside to be alone and incidentally going along with it, the great dislike of public transit in America, because public transit is where you go outside to be with people, a very distinction. And the Motorcar has the Supreme form of privacy has been threatened, in fact, superseded by television. Television brings the outside inside and takes the inside outside; it really pulls the rug out or the highway out from under the car. It deprives the car of its rationality and its meaning. If the car had not lost its real meaning in our lives, there would be no oil prices whatever; that is, nobody would even dream of allowing the oil prices to occur. The oil prices, of course, is a promotional deal; there's no question. I mean, we all, there, that's well known, but it is something that could not have happened if the car had not already been obsolesced. The car has lost its place in the heart of the people; that doesn't mean it's going to disappear overnight, and not at all; all it means is the effects of the car are disappeared, and privacy, privacy and service environment are part of the effect.
When I say the medium is the message, I'm saying that the motor car is not a medium; the medium is the highway; the factories are the oil companies; that is the medium. In other words, the medium of the Guard is the effects of the carp. When you pull the effects away, the meaning of the cars go. The car as an engineering object has nothing to do with these effects; the car is a figure in a ground of services; it's when you change the ground that you change the carp. The car does not operate as the medium, but rather as one of the major effects of the media. So, well, the medium is a message is not a simple remark, and I've always hesitated to explain it; it really means a hidden environment of services created by an innovation, and the hidden environment of services is the thing that changes people; it is the environment that changes people, not the technology. But to come back then momentarily to the problem of Village and the problem of organized secrets, Bill it says we must close our schools because the answers are now outside and let the kids go back to work and run around the community and get an education. I'm suggesting that the answer is not that but to put the questions in the classroom and to start a real dialogue there. Organized ignorance as a way of bypassing the problem of knowledge as confusion and as block to Discovery breaks me on to the subject of Sputnik and the laws of the media. Once put Dick went up in August 17, 1957. It put the planet inside a man-made environment for the first time. Spaceship Earth has no passengers, only crew. Sputnik transformed the planet into a spaceship Earth with programmed problems; ecology became the name of the game from the moment of Sputnik. Nature ended; the planet became an art form inside a man capsule, and life will never be the same on this planet again. Nature ended and art took over; ecology is art. We now have to confront the need for an Ecology of media themselves; it's not just raw materials but the man-made materials too that thou have to be harmonized and resolved in their interaction. Mr. Schwartz, 10 Tony Schwartz, in his book *The Responsive Chord*, explains this very tricky problem about television as a new environmental medium by saying that the TV image uses the eye as an ear; it's a way of drawing attention to the fact that the TV image has a very different effect on your psychic life than the movie image and therefore educationally speaking, TV has very strange consequences and could never be used as a mere Transportation device.
The laws of the media, which are like the medes and the Persians, all right, quite simply this: that every medium exaggerates some function; spectacles exaggerate or enlarge or have sleeve visual function; they obsolesce another function; they retrieve a much older function, and they flip into the opposite form. The simplest form I know to illustrate this principle, which works for all media, whether it's a teaspoon, corsets, or motor card, the simplest form is money. Money increases transactions; it obsolesces barter; it retrieves pot ledge or conspicuous waste, and it flips into credit card, which is not money at all. Now every medium enhancer starts out by exaggerating something that we all have and then finally flipping into the opposite of itself. The Motorcar flipped into airplane, but first came the bicycle; the Wright brothers were bicycle men; the gyroscopic principle of the bicycle made possible the airplane. The hula hoop arrived just before the mini skirt; the hula hoop was a tribal deaths which preceded the tribal custard; the effects come first; the cause is later. Now the laws of the media, I simply mentioned in passing; I could spend a long time on them; I simply mentioned them in passing because they are at least a hope that we can reduce this confusion to some sort of order.