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This is Perspective Number 6, subtitled “A Conversation with Marshall McLuhan,” a 30-minute package for broadcast on Wednesday, June 1, 1966. The Voice of America presents Perspective.
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This week on Perspective, a conversation with Marshall McLuhan, whose writings have probably engendered more discussion about the mass media than any other books in the past several years. Every so often, someone comes along and touches an intellectual nerve. What he says is passionately believed and passionately disbelieved, but whatever the reaction, it is a strong one. Such is the reaction to Professor Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian director of the Center for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto and author of a number of books, among them *Understanding Media*. One major critic has called McLuhan’s writing a fundamental breakthrough in modern thinking. Another critic, equally famous, says he is frozy-minded, low in data and definition, and a figure of solemn pseudo-science. But critics and readers alike, whether enthusiasts or detractors, agree on the complexity of his ideas.
Recently, Professor McLuhan was the guest of the *Open Mind* television program, which was originally broadcast by Station WNBC in New York. Talking with him is Eric Goldman, himself a distinguished professor of history at Princeton University and host of the *Open Mind* series. We found their conversation complex, lively, and vastly interesting. We think you will too. We hear first from Mr. Goldman.
Mr. Gold: If you’ll be good, let’s start there with the heart of your doctrine itself, the now famous sentence: “The medium is the message.”
McLuhan: The medium is a happening; it creates an environment; it, uh, is, um, ostensibly used to convey data in a particular pinpointed way. In effect, a medium creates a totally new environment for the human senses, whether it’s radio or TV, movies, or or book. The book medium created a vast new print environment and a whole new psychic outlook over a period of centuries; it had a long run. But a medium is the message in the sense that it creates a totally new world and a totally new psychic outlook for populations.
Goldman: One of the things, Mr. McLuhan, that puzzled me a bit as I read your writings is the extent to which you downgrade the content; that is, the medium itself, you say, is the message. Does this mean the content doesn’t matter at all, or it matters much less than people think it matters?
McLuhan: Yes, much less than they imagine. For example, in in any given situation, people cannot see the environment; they see only the old environment. They never see the Emperor’s New Clothes; they see only the old clothes. Uh, they there’s always a nostalgic, uh, rear-view mirror look; they never can look straight out at the environment. Only artists and antisocial children and uh such people dare look at the environment. The Emperor’s New Clothes are perfectly visible to them, but to well-adjusted, uh, respectable people, the old clothes are what is seen.
Goldman: Well, let’s let’s uh take a specific instance of this to try to clarify things for for me and for the audience. A program like this now; there are images of you and me going out there, uh, we’re also talking. What’s the message?
McLuhan: The message, in the sense that the uh whole effect of uh the medium of TV upon them is this: that with TV the audience becomes the screen, not the camera. They pick us up, um, by way of being the screen. We impinge upon their senses as the movie image impinges on the screen. They are the vanishing point, and uh the effect of being the receiving end or the vanishing point of imagery, the exact reverse of the movie, is to turn people inward, in depth, meditatively.
Goldman: Well, this is, if I understand you, this is a rather a sad moment though, because here we are engaging in what we hope is a cerebral process, and the part of it, the cerebral process, really doesn’t matter much, does it?
McLuhan: Oh, on, let’s say that the uh what is happening since TV is that the cerebral is becoming much deeper, more profound than it had been before TV.
Goldman: Ah, now now this this deeper or or profounder thing, uh, what what is deep about getting a some sort of impression of us as opposed to understanding what we’re saying? What is deep in psychology as compared with just psychological classification?
McLuhan: It consists in relating things to one another; the unexpectedly depth. It does not mean making profound observations; it means relating perfectly obvious things to perfectly obvious things. Uh, depth is a matter of interrelating. TV is a profound depth medium because it interrelates rather than isolates points of view. Instead of isolating a small aspect, a tiny splinter of a situation, it creates a kind of iconic surround. That is why a TV is a very fuzzy image as compared with movie. The TV thinker may seem fuzzy because he doesn’t have a point of view; he is mainly concerned with processes. Or processes. I could keep… when I step, I come south off uh the border, I realize I have to change from process to process. But TV is a profound process medium, and in everything that’s been happening to our youngsters since TV, puzzling to their parents, is this depth involvement in processes which they cannot find in the school room.
Goldman: As I understand your analysis, uh, this is a rather uncontrollable process; that is, that you and I really can’t be sure by doing this, that, or the other thing that we are going to create this, that, or the other process out there.
McLuhan: I think you can if you take time to study it, but um you see mostly uh when people are playing with TV they think of it as in terms of the old medium, movie. The content of TV is thought off the movie, and they don’t watch the TV form; therefore, they don’t attempt to control TV; they control the movie form while using TV. But if this is a a kind of um almost poetic relationship between the the the people on TV and the audience out there, uh it does not operate according to mechanisms which are totally understandable by a rational process and therefore are not controllable, are they?
Goldman: I think, on the contrary, it’s uh very controllable, very understandable if attention is paid. You’ll see the fact that one is almost inevitably and instinctively attempting to control the preceding process, not the current one. Yeah, for example, the safety car. After all, the car is not a new form, but people are only beginning to look at it as something that has social impact and uh that might be controlled. The this is, I think, a rather radical moment in our history, the moment of the safety belt and the safety car is a moment of looking at the consequences of forms rather than at the content of forms. If you merely look at the car from the point of view of the driver and the engineer, you pay no attention whatever to the consequences of car on society or city or anything. Suddenly, in quite a great new trend has developed in in many areas of our society, uh a great concern about consequences, effects. That’s where you mentioned my *Understanding Media* having touched the nerve; that’s where I come in. I’m concerned with effects of these forms on people, and they are involuntary insofar as they’re unheeded. Uh, you know, you you can put your finger in a buzz saw and wonder where it went because you can’t see the saw. Uh, if you don’t pay any attention to the nature of buzz saw, you can lose many fingers without even knowing where they went. Uh, we do that with media all the time; we’ve done it with all media.
Goldman: No, Mr. McLuhan, in my materials here uh for this program, uh a number of commentators pursuing the kind of point that I was pursuing before have commented that, as they understand your view, you really don’t think that changing the contents of television would change much this process.
McLuhan: No. You know, you may have seen a *New Yorker* joke: a couple of watching TV, and one says, “When you think of the vast educational potential of TV, aren’t you glad it doesn’t?” This is based on the assumption, you see, that it’s the content that does the educating, not the medium. Now, if it should be just the other way around, and uh very few people have asked themselves anything about that, and then it would be understandable why these things happen involuntarily and unasked.
Goldman: But how far can we push this, I mean, it all the way to Peyton Place? If if you put on Peyton Place or if you put on uh a docu, a news documentary, now the contents are radically different in that case, but still, from your point of view, the medium is transcending the contents in significance so far as the person out there is concerned.
McLuhan: It’s like changing the temperature in a room; it doesn’t matter what’s in the room at all, or what pictures are on the wall, or what who’s in the room. If the temperature drops 40°, suddenly the effect on our our outlook, our attitudes, profound. MH media are like that; they just alter the total social temperature. Since TV, the whole American political temperature is cooled down, down, down, until the political process is almost approaching rigor mortis. This uh these effects of media are not uh the areas in which they look. After all, the medical profession was in the habit of looking in the wrong places for causes and effects for many centuries, and uh no one has come up with any suggestions for how to control media or the social impact of technologies until now. All right, now, but here’s where where I I become uh stopped in in trying to understand your thing. You say that it is possible to understand this process that’s created. How does how does one understand? What are the the tool?
McLuhan: You make inventory of effects of changes. If you want to understand the nature of TV, you make a complete inventory of all the things that have changed in the past past 12 years in dress, in social behavior, in program tastes. I mean, after all, the Vince Casey type of program would not have been tolerated in an earlier medium. It uh this is an example of the new seriousness, inwardness, and depth of this medium, in the sense of becoming quite grim. The um the grimness that comes with TV afflicts our children profoundly, and uh they take themselves very seriously. But we we uh we then inventory what’s happening in society, and we attribute it to the TV. You don’t have to attribute it; you simply look; you look for patterns. You uh in the same way, if you wanted to check the effects of automation, you do an inventory of all the types of changes, not what automation is being set to do. You would never find out anything about automation by looking at what it has been asked to do, catalogues and such, always the old job, never the new job. You would find out what automation was by checking the effects of automation on the outlook of people, on their relation to work organization and decision-making, because in effect, automation is an acceleration, a speed up of information processes, and speed up completely alters pattern recognition, completely alters the uh ways in which we cope with our own lives.
Goldman: May may I take a spefic specific instance to this? Uh, one of the things in American society today which is important is crime. Let us say take take a well-known instance. Um, we look at that; something is bringing it about. Yes, what is the connection with TV? How do we profound the crime? Why why does why do our newspapers only use bad news? If it isn’t bad news, it isn’t real news. Why does news have to be bad to be real news?
McLuhan: Nobody would print any good news; it’s that’s that’s already in the advertisements. You’ve got an awful lot of good news in the ads, and uh you need an awful lot of bad news to sell all that good news. Bad news and uh wars, catastrophes, and Holocaust are bad news in the ordinary sense, and uh stories of individual crime and so on. Bad news represents the area of happening where there’s maximized change going on; where you have maximal change there you have bad news. The delinquent is a person like a small child, always crossing boundaries, always exploring the differences between Bogart and Baudelaire. Not very great; they’re both explorers; they’re antisocial types who cross all the conventional boundaries; they’re criminals. The investigator, the Snoop, the sleuth, the observer, the malcontent, these men are criminal; they’re artists. The artist is always a criminal in the sense that he ignores social conventions and is exploring boundaries.
Goldman: But now, by what intellectual process, sir, do you attribute the creation of this type to television?
McLuhan: Oh, no, I don’t attribute it to television, because this type came in with the 19th-century artist and uh and detective and so on. It has extended enormously into the James Bond world and the adolescent world since television.
Goldman: I know, but what causal theory…
McLuhan: Not by not by any causal theory, excuse me. I’m just playing the Devil’s advocate on this. I happen to think television has something to do with it, but by what causal theory, by what intellectual process do we establish the television that something do, when there are a lot of other factors in society that also…
Goldman: You’re looking at the components again, looking at the effects; you’re not looking at the the processes instituted by these forms.
McLuhan: Uh, TV as an image, you see, if you consider its structure from an engineering point of view, you be you begin to understand some patterns that the program content would never reveal. The image is structured as a series of little flies that cover the viewer; they fly at you and and surround you and cover you. You are Lord of the Flies while you’re watching TV; you’re a regular pig. You remember, I’m using the allusion to the novel, uh, *Lord of the Flies*. The TV viewer is Lord of the Flies, and he is surrounded with an image; it’s a wraparound, tactual image; it’s not visual. The TV viewer develops a profound tactual probing habit that the T the movie viewer never had. The movie viewer lived in a world of fantasy and vision; the TV viewer lives in a world of tactility and involvement; he’s a skin diver; he is a Lord of the Flies. Uh, you see what I’m getting at; that people have not studied the TV image; studied the TV programming and content.
Goldman: To to further um clarify the the the larger import of your thinking, may I move away from television for a moment to the telephone? Yes. Now, one instance you used struck me as being a particularly interesting one. You talk about the telephone; you say it’s an irresistible intruder; it’s an intensely personal form that ignores all the claims of visual privacy prized by literate man. And you use this extraordinary instance of the the madman, Howard Unruh, in Camden, New Jersey, who’s killing 13 people and then returns home, uh the emergency crews call, uh, and at one point, editor calls, uh, Unruh stops firing at the people and answers, “Hello.” “This Howard?” “Yes.” “Why are you killing people?” “I don’t know; I can’t answer that yet; I’ll have to talk to you later; I’m too busy now.” Um, would you comment further on this instance?
McLuhan: Well, it may be slightly misleading in my view of the state of mind of this uh unhappy man, but you can see that he was caught up in the process of crime in a fascinating way, and um this concern with the process is peculiar to our time. He had no point of view on crime, but he was fascinated by involvement in the process. The reporting of this process is what is called happenings in our society today. But the telephone, you see, has this mysterious property that while using it, it’s very difficult to visualize anybody, and by and by con uh on the contrary, it is also uh it also creates the idea that you are securely alone and isolated. But the absence of this uh visual completion, for example, when listening to radio, you have a visual image all the time; it’s no there’s no difficulty in visualizing the announcers, the people in the programs on radio. It’s very difficult to visualize the person to whom you’re speaking on telephone. I’ve I’ve talked to people like stockbrokers about this who said they’ve spent their lives talking to people on the telephone that they have never seen, and when by some chance they do encounter them, MH they get a terrific shock, MH because they have had no image of them all these years and thought they knew them very well. The absence of image on the telephone is a great big positive potential of that medium that has never been tapped; it could be used for teaching mathematics to disadvantaged children and so on, to people who have no mathematical aptitude and so on. However, people don’t study the media; they don’t study the forms and their effects; they just study the U inputs, what the man says in the T…
Goldman: This um this emphasis of yours on what the electronic type of thing, the telephone, TV, etc., is doing to our society is accompanied, as I read you, by um uh a downgrading of the possible, the potential influence of the written word.
McLuhan: I wouldn’t think that the written word had much potential. After all, for 500 years it has been un loosing its potential. Suddenly though, with the arrival of Xerox and xerography, the written word or the printed word is about to enter and go into orbit in an altogether new dimension. The book is about to become an altogether different form and to have it altogether different relation to readers. Uh, one of the one of the biggest revolutions in the history of technology is coming to the book with xerography, in which the reader becomes publisher. The reader no longer has to just pick up packages from the bookshelves; he can take anything he likes of his own or anybody else’s and and Xerox it and pattern it, shape it, and put it out; he can publish himself. All the business officers of this land are engaged in publishing on a big scale with respect to the actual process.
Goldman: My feeling is that that the your the thrust of your analysis uh leads one to feel that the um the process in that that goes on when one reads has lost its potency as opposed to the process that one goes through when watching television.
McLuhan: The process of reading is a very hypnotic and soporific one. Most people like to read for that purpose; they don’t read to make discoveries or to have startling experiences. They have long accepted print as a lulling, soothing medium, and if you read both pages back and forth like that, you’re soon asleep. If you’re serious about your reading, you will have to go back over and over again to find out anything you’ve looked at. Now, this uh is this historically true? Has not reading books caused men to act?
Goldman: Reading books…
McLuhan: The print created a a technologically an environment called the public. Yeah, there was no public before print, and the public disappeared with electric surround into mass. Now, the difference between a public and a mass audience is nothing to do with uh cultural values; it it has to do with the fact that a public is consists of separate individuals, each with a private point of view. A mass audience has no point of view at all; it’s so involved; people are so involved in one another in the uh speed of electric uh circuitry that they have a sense of relationship and off responsibility to their society that is quite new. Their involvement in the mass or electric circuitry creates a tremendous sense of responsibility and anxiety that is new. The public never had that because it was up to the individual; we respected the individual’s private outlook. In the case of the public, uh the public is literally created by individual readers, each looking at the same material from his own point of fuel. Under electric circuitry there is no such public; there is no mere point of view.
Goldman: Let me mention function, excuse me, the function of the of of the person, this individual reading this book, continues uh to to be an important function in your analysis, and after all, I’m a professor of literature, and I’m that is why I began to study media because I began to see the extraordinary effect they were having on my medium, print.
McLuhan: Yeah, that is why I I decided that in any uh with any view to survival it was was time to have a look at what was going on.
Goldman: All right, well, now you’ve written a uh a quite influential book, *Understanding Media*, and you have expressed certain ideas in that in this individual relationship to the reader that you were speaking up; you are now talking about the same thing in this other medium uh in order to achieve the effect you want, which is the effect of understanding. You presumably… what do you what do you do different?
McLuhan: Br a tendency is to stress dialogue rather than package. The old TV, in the the new kind of writing, beginning with symbolism, began to stress language and statement as probe, not as a package of information. Prior to that, back more than a century, the writer had thought of himself as packaging data and moving them along to readers. Then with with people like Baudelaire and the since him, or more and more people began to use statements for the purpose of exploring and probing the dimensions of experience, and this is a non-literary uh procedure. The U literary form, as it records and packages from a given point of view an experience, is very much like the third-dimension uh perspective where world of painting, which also disappeared at the same time as this prospective world in literature. With Cézanne, he said, “Let us begin to paint as if we held things in our hands, not as if we were looking at them at all.” Now, this… why did he uh why do you think he said that?
Goldman: He wanted to get at this involvement and interrelationship of all the senses. When you merely look at things, you are using the visual sense almost exclusively and down rating the other senses.
McLuhan: Our print culture has for 500 years uh depressed all the sensory life except one sense. Our educational system has never educated people except in one sense, the visual sense. So we are now with we now, you see, have a media that stress all the senses, and we have no education to cope with this. The media talk… we still educate as if there were one medium. Mhm, and our educational establishment is that much out of out of relation to what’s going on in the world. Now, with respect to this um this book, which is operating on the individual reader by the visual process alone, and television, which is bombarding him in a number of ways… television is is is a more powerful medium.
Goldman: Well, what I am asking is that he set up a dialogue with these media, that he fight back; that you should not sit there watching TV; you should have a real dialogue with it and explain to it what it is and that you are not going to be taken in by it one little bit.
McLuhan: Uh, this has nothing to do with the programming; this has to do with this coming at you, Lord of the Flies stuff. Now, the uh this dialogue among… it’s coming at you; it’s affecting you more than the mere visual process.
Goldman: Or oh yes, because it isn’t primarily visual.
McLuhan: Well, no… is this a um is this a good thing so far as you’re concerned or a bad thing?
Goldman: Now, you see, you have slipped into the literary language of the classifier. The visual man is always trying to check things out by classification and matching.
McLuhan: I’ve said the language of the social commentator. You have said something is happening in our society; we now have a medium which is bombarding us all of our s, but when you say “good,” H you’re saying, “Is it good in relation to what?” You’re know the social scientist; is it good in relationship to the established values of the West, let us say? You remember what the social scientist uh said to a friend of here, “How was your wife?” and the social other social scientist replied, “Do you mean, ‘Is she better?’ If so, in relation to what?”
Goldman: This is a very interesting position you’ve arrived at from what seems to me a very improbable background: the uh a a Canadian, the son of Baptist parents, engineer…
McLuhan: Don’t don’t worry about those data; they’re all wrong; they’re all wrong.
Goldman: Well, how how did you get here then, to this position, this intellectual position?
McLuhan: Well, it’s a it’s a form of dialogue or activity that I carry on with my time; it’s not a position; I don’t stay in one position. That’s why I’m attacked, you see. If I wanted to avoid attack, I would occupy one fixed position. Anybody in our culture is regarded as envied as long as he’ll stay fixed. Once he starts moving around and crossing boundaries, he’s a delinquent, and he’s fair game. We sometimes call inconsistent too, which merely means that he is not occupying a fixed position; he’s exploring.
This week on Perspective, a conversation with Professor Marshall McLuhan, whose writings are fantastically praised or scathingly criticized these days, but not ignored. Mr. McLuhan was the guest of the *Open Mind* television program, whose host is Eric Goldman, professor of history at…
Princeton University, we invite you to rejoin us one week from today, when the Voice of America will again present Perspective.
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