Marshall McLuhan 1965 - The Future of Man in the Electric Age

in a sense you've been a historian as you've gone about your work and uh let's talk first a little if we may about your book the Gutenberg Galaxy where you argue that for a long time without actually understanding it we've been living in a a culture which in which our whole way of looking at the world has been determined by typ typography by the successiveness of print and so would you like to enlarge on that a bit well I remember I decided to write that book when I came across a piece by JC KS the anthrop psychiatrist on the African mind in health and disease describing the effects of the printed word on the uh African populations it startled me and uh decided me to uh Plunge in but the we we have a better opportunity in seeing our old Technologies when they confront uh other populations elsewhere in the world the effects they have on those people are so startling and so sudden that we have an opportunity to see what happened to us over many centuries yes which we couldn't see because we're inside the system don't you say that um what happened was that we got used to having our information processed uh as it is in um in in print that is to say it's set out successively whereas at the root of your thoughts perhaps there's the view that uh we can see the world as an image instantaneously but that we've chosen under the pressure of a technology to set it out successively like a a block of print well every technology has its own ground roles as it were it decides all sorts of Arrangements in other spheres the uh fact of uh script and uh the ability to make inventories and collect data and store data changed many social habits and processes uh back as early as 3000 BC uh the uh however that's about as early as it as it scripts began the the the effects of rearranging one's experience organizing one's experience by these new extensions of our powers are quite unexpected perhaps one way of putting it is to say that writing represents a high degree of specializing of our powers yes uh compared to pre-literate uh societies there is a considerable concentration on one faculty when you develop a a skill a skill like scripting and this is the visual what you call a visual yes this this is a specialized stress compared to anything in ordinary oral societies there there have been many studies made of this in various ways but in our own Western World the rise of the phonetic alphabet seems to have had much to do with platonic culture and The Ordering of experience in the terms of ideas classifying of data and experience by ideas you mean that the that site has become the preeminent sense as it was for Plato and it went on being so in so-called civilized as opposed to primitive increasingly so reach the climax with with the invention of printing printing stepped it up to a considerable pitch yes now how would you how would you describe the the uh uh impact of the invention of the printing press give us some instances of what happened as a consequence of this it created almost uh overnight it created what we call nationalism what in fact effect effect was a public the old manuscript forms were not sufficiently powerful instruments of technology to create publics in the sense that print was able to do unified homogeneous reading public everything that we prize in our Western World in matters of individualism and separatism and uh of unique point of view private judgment all those factors are highly favored by the printed word and not really favored by other forms of culture like radio or and or earlier by even by manuscript but this stepping up of the fragmented the private the individual the private judgment the point of view all in fact our whole vocabularies underwent huge change with the arrival of such technology could I ask you now about the the the technology which on your view is superseding it and which is having its own effect on our lives uh comparable with but of course entirely different in kind to theen technology was in mechanical to an extreme degree in fact originated a good deal of the later mechanical Revolution um assembly line style and the fragmentation of of operations and functions as the as the very rationale of industrialization yes uh this uh fragmentation had begun much earlier with uh after the Hunter and the food gatherers with Neolithic man I suppose in an extreme way one might say that Gutenberg was the last phase of the Neolithic Revolution at Gutenberg plus the Industrial Revolution that followed was a pushing of specialism that came in with the Neolithic man the uh agrarian Revolution a pushing of specialism all the way and then suddenly uh we encounter the electric uh or electromagnetism uh which seems to have a totally different principle is it for some people feel an extension of our nervous system not an extension of merely of our bodies the if the wheel is an extension of feet and Tool R of hands back arms uh the electromagnetism seems to be in its technological manifestations an extension of our nerves and becomes mainly an information system it is above all a feedback or looped system the peculiarity you see after the age of the wheel you suddenly encounter the age of the circuit and the wheel push pushed to an extreme suddenly acquires opposite characteristics this seems to happen with a good many technologies that if they get pushed to a very uh dist uh distant point they reverse the characteristics what difference is the is the electric technology making to our interest in content in what in what uh uh the medium actually says a very comp business I'm sure but one of the effects of switching over to circuitry from mechanical uh moving parts and wheels is an enormous increase in the amount of information that is moving yeah you cannot cope with vast amounts of information in the old fragmentary classified patterns you tend to go looking for Mythic and structural forms in order to manage such complex data and moving at very high speed so the uh electric Engineers often speak of pattern recognition as a normal need of people processing data electrically and by computers and so on Need for pattern recognition it's a need which The Poets foresaw uh essentially go in there drive back to Mythic forms of organizing experience well here here we are a couple of of archaic literate men Gutenberg men talking on the television um what is the audience uh getting from this is it is it listening to what we're saying or is it is it feeling the impact of a new electric medium there is a book called is anybody listening uh it's a it's what worries the advertising man a great deal the uh the idea of feedback of being involved in one's participating in one's own audience participation is a natural product of this circuitry everything everything under electric conditions is looped you become folded over into yourself into your image of yourself changes completely in your other book The more recent one where you understanding media where you go into all this you use as a kind of slogan I think the expression the medium is the message would you like to illuminate that it I I think it is more satisfactory to say that any medium be it radio or be it wheel uh tends to create complete new completely new human environment the human environment is U as as such tends to have a a kind of invisible character about it uh the unawareness of the environmental uh is compensated for by some attention to the content of the environment the uh uh environment as merely a set of ground rules and as a kind of uh overall uh enveloping Force gets very little recognition as a form uh except from the artist I think our Arts if you look at them in this connection do throw quite a lot of light on environments the artist is usually engaged in uh somewhat excitedly explaining to people the character of new environments and new strategies of culture necessary to cope with him Blake is an extreme case of a man who was absolutely panicked by the kind of new environment that he saw forming around him under the aices of Newton and lo and industrialism he thought it was was going to smash the unity of the imaginative and sensory sensory life all to bits uh but the are the are the artist uh what he was uh insisting upon in his own lifetime became a quite a popular and uh widespread movement later on yeah can can I return to television cuz here we are where whoever's listening to us is also undergoing the impact of television at the moment on view they they're all deceiving themselves in so far as they're paying attention to what we are saying because uh what what's going on uh is a medium which is in itself the image uh that they ought to be concerning themselves with the medium of television has many characteristics which have been unheeded uh mostly it is seen under the aspect of movie form the TV camera does not have a shutter does not take pictures uh it handles uh it uh picks up as radio picks up the TV uh camera picks up its environment handles it it scans it and the effect of the TV image is Iconic in the sense that it shapes things by Contours rather than by little snapshots now this is one one of the words that you you use a good deal iconic I think we better be clear well I think of it again to to uh tie in with Blake his whole insistence upon the engraved highly patterned and highly uh sculptured forms and images that the iconic in that sense is very low in visual quality very high in tal quality active touch not cutaneous but Active touch as the psychologist you call television a tactile medium iconic medium having much in common with the cartoon for which it is ideally suited much more and much more Well Suited than for pictures um if you you feel that we are going to have to come to terms or we are coming to terms much more than typographical man with this kind of of instantaneous image you and I'd like now just to ask you about the distinction that you draw between different kinds of media within the electric technology you call some such as television cool and some such as radio hot now what does this mean it um has to do with the slang the slang phrase the hot and the cool which um puzzles many people uh the way it's used in slang reverses the meaning of cool uh cool in the slang form has come to mean involved a deeply participative deeply engaged everything that we had formerly met by heated argument is now called cool yeah in slang cool though the idea that cool it had has reversed its meaning I think has some bearing on the fact that our culture has shifted a good deal of its stress uh into a um demand that we be more committed more involved in the situations in which we ordinarily work and experence a cool medium is one in which the the definition is low and the audience has to work and Supply the gaps well like a a cartoon you you were mentioning before this is real cool yes where as compared with classical music is has many of these aspects of discontinuity and very much room for fill in yes but where the information or data level is low uh the fill in or participation is high if you fill the situation with complex data uh the uh opportunity for completion fill in is is less and participation is less now this um uh reminds me to ask you what I think is pretty important about your work that if you've got phases like this which are determined technologically uh one can not only speak about the kind of uh the State of Affairs we now have one can also to some degree do some prediction I think in understanding media you sometimes write as if we' got on if we' pushed on deeper into electric technology than we actually have uh but you do venture some predictions about the kind of Life the kind of quality of feeling that we're going to have with the new alteration in our senses could you say something about that well uh I remember when I was here two years ago after a long absence I was quite startled at the uh upsurge of regional dialects in England as compared with 20 years earlier and um the relative decline of standard uh and homogeneous English and the quite uh uh proud uh display of dialects that I had hardly heard before when I lived here this U Drive in depth toward a regional depth of culture is a normal feature of electronic forms because of this circuitry that involves us deeper and deeper in ourselves the the French separatists for example at the present time in Quebec are very much related to this new image they have of themselves in television a depth image the vision of the future that your book could leave with is one a big brother image in a sense you speak of of for example programming U cultures Pro for instance you say that if the South African uh scene looks like getting too hot because of an overdose of radio we program a lot television cool them off U this kind of interference with uh uh what the typographical literate man calls human rights we have never stopped interfering drastically with our eles by every technology we could latch on to we have absolutely disrupted you think this might Our Lives over and over again lead us into a kind of electric totalitarianism I think uh no I think the uh uh logic un if unimpeded the logic of this sort of electric world is stasis yes and out of this I'm I'm forgive me for interrupting again I was ask where where do you see is there a Terminus or should we always go from the thesis of type graphy to the I think if there is a logic and a hopeful one that appears in this it is the dispelling of all unconscious aspects of Our Lives altogether that we uh in order to live with ourselves in such depth in such instant uh feedback situations we have to understand everything so that our easygoing uh lying uh Ling about in the lap of the unconscious cannot endure that we will have to take over the total human environment as an artifact but it seems to be forced upon us the uh the need to become completely autonomous and aware of all the consequences of everything we're doing before the consequences occur is where we're heading

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Keywords: Marshall Mcluhan, Future of Electric Man, Electric Age, Media Ecology, Media is the Message, Counterblast, Understanding Media, Frank Kermode

Id: 0pcoC2l7ToI

Length: 16min 12sec (972 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 02 2016