Mc luhan 1

UNDERSTANDING MEDIA
Karlshochschule International University

Karlsruhe, December 9th, 2009

Dr. Cornelia Hegele-Raih

Starter
2

“What we know is a drop, what we don‟t know is an ocean”
(Isaac Newton)

Dr. Cornelia Hegele-Raih: Understanding Media

The ten rules of good communication
3

1. Be polite!
2. Listen!
3. Know your message!
4. Know your public!
5. Offer your public a clear benefit!
6. Communicate wise and with passion!
7. Be clear and be careful!
8. Get feedback!
9. If you don‟t succeed, try again in a different way!
10. Stop communicating, if any rule is violated!


The ten rules of good communication
4

In one sentence:

Be respectful!


Corporate Communication – the ideal
5

 Rationality
 Strategy
 Consistency
 Truth
 Clearness
 Certainty
 Simplicity
 People orientation/Dialogue
 “Crisis management”
 Social Media
 Corporate Social Responsibility/Ethics

Corporate Communication – the ideal
6

Problem: It just doesn‟t work like this. In my opinion, it turns
out more and more that it in most cases doesn‟t work at all


Corporate Communication today
7

 PR as a corporate function came up at the end of the 19th
century together with the first large industrial organizations
 In Germany, the company Krupp established its first press
department in 1870
 The upcoming US railway companies searched for ways to
influence the politics and public in the end of the 19th century
 1900 Publicity Bureau of Boston established as first public
relations firm.
 Since then PR departments steadily grew, because more and
more specialized forms of communication and media have to
be handled in a more and more professional way
 Today, Corporate Communication is a billion dollar business


Corporate Communication today
8

 Especially in the 1990s, Corporations and personally CEOs
recognized to be more and more dependent on professional
communication
 PR specialists became an integral part of top management,
often reporting directly to the president or CEO. Many CEOs
and politicians today have “spin doctors”
 A growing bulk of people deal with Corporate Communication:
More than 200.000 communication experts in US and 50.000
PR experts in Germany (cautious estimation)
 PR-Experts see themselves as the winner of the
advertisement crisis


CC doesn‟t work (anymore)
9

 Edelman Trust Barometer 2009:
• In the last decades, trust in business declined constantly and is now
on an all-time-low.
• Two-thirds of informed publics trust corporations less than they did a
year ago; 77% say they refuse to buy products or services from a
company they distrusted. 72% criticized a distrusted company to a
friend or colleague.
• Only 38% said they trust business to do what‟s right.
• Trust in bank dropped by 33% in the US.
• Trust in business magazines, stock or industry analyst reports – last
year‟s leader – decreased from 57% to 44% and from 56% to 47%.
• Globally, only 29% trust information about a company from a CEO –
down from 36% last year.
• Only 13% trust corporate or product advertising – down from 36%.

10

 Managers, bankers, politicians and PR experts have the
worst reputation of all professions.
 Gallup: Only 13% of the employees are highly dedicated to
work and to the company, more than two thirds only do the
necessary. 20% have already left the company
psychologically (fall out syndrome).
 Employees drown in a flood of internal communication which
gets more and more professional: e-mails, newsletters,
DVDs, videos, live streams, podcasts, employee magazines,
Corporate TV etc.
 Nevertheless, most of the employees say that they don‟t find
in it the information they want or need (Sottong, HBM 2008).


11

 Despite all propaganda of “openness” and “honesty” it has
become quite normal that employees hear important
information e.g. about lay-offs, bad financial results or spying
scandals in their company in the external media.
 Trust in institutions like Social Market Economy, Democracy
and in politicians is also declining since decades.
 Only 22% of the Germans today trust politicians, Only 60% trust
in democracy, in the Eastern part of Germany only 44% - 31%
would like to get back the old system of the GDR.
 The Social Market Economy is only perceived as a good
system by 48%; in the Eastern part only by a third of the
population.


12

 People in Germany trust most in the
• Police (85%)
• Air traffic (75%)
• TV reporting (64%)
• Justice (63%)
• Army (60%)
• News papers (57%)
• Government (38%)
• Political parties (22%)


13

 Outside USA:
• In U.K., France and Germany, trust in Business was already at a
low level of 36% among the audience of 35-64-years olds – and
stayed there.
• The only EU-countries where business made a notable gain in
trust were Netherlands and Sweden

 High and rising trust in BRIC-Economies:
• In China trust climbed to 69% from 61%, trust in banks rose from
72% to 84%.
• But also, 79% of Japanese, 56% of Chinese, and 49% of the
Indian opinion leader say they have growing concern about
business, and Korea, Mexico, and Brazil report now low levels of
trust in CEOs


14

“If you make people think they‟re thinking , they‟ll love you.
But if you really make them think, they‟ll hate you.”
(Don Marquis, US-American author)

Favorite quote of Harold Kroto (Winner of Nobel Price in Physics)

What are the reasons for this mess?


What are the reasons?
15

 People? PR experts or CEOs?
 Complexity?
 Dynamics?
 Or both? (“Dynaxity”)
 Financial crisis?
 Management mistakes?
 Unethical behavior?
 New media? Social-Web 2.0?

All this is not the whole story: The erosion of the reputation
of so many institutions is a constant process, which has
already started in the 1960s


Why CC doesn„t work – four theses
16

 The game has completely changed
 Mindsets of management and the education of PR
experts have to change radically.
 Ethics is important and should be a goal in itself – CSR
will hopefully make the world a better place, but it will
never ever solve the image problem. The same is true
about Social Media
 Media do play an central role. But there are a lot of
misconceptions about them…


What you need for success
17

Values

Knowledge

Techniques
Experience


Useful Theories for Business Communication
18

 Biology (not only brain science!)
 Anthropology/Ethnology
 Psychology
 Pedagogic
 Social Psychology
 Organization Science
 Sociology
 Linguistics, Discourse analysis
 Philosophy
 Communication/Media-theory/PR research
 Management Science
 System theory/cybernetics

Theories which could explain the problem
19

 Neo-Institutionalism (John Meyer, Brian Rowan 1978,
Nils Brunsson 2009)
 System theory (Niklas Luhmann, 1927-1998)
 Theory of Habitus, differentiation and markets of
language by the French anthropologist and sociologist
(Pierre Bourdieu 1930-2002)
 Marshall McLuhan‟s thoughts on media


Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)
20

“In the country of the blind, the
one-eyed man is not king. He
is taken to be an hallucinated
lunatic”


Marshall McLuhan
21

 Lived from 1911-80
 Canadian communications theorist and “high guru” of
media culture
 The most publicized English teacher in the twentieth
century and arguably the most controversial.
 He coined the well-known phrases of “global village” and
“the medium is the message” in 1964, when no one
could have predicted today‟s information-dependent
planet.
 “The mechanical Bride. Folklore of Industrial man (1951)”
 “The Gutenberg Galaxy” (1962)
 “Understanding Media.” (1964)

Marshall McLuhan
22

 The “Hype”: In 1965, two fans of McLuhan and PR experts, Feigen
and Gossage, organized what they called a "McLuhan festival“

 McLuhan soon became a fixture of media discourse. Newsweek
magazine did a cover story on him; articles appeared in Life
Magazine, Harper's, Fortune, Esquire, and others. Cartoons about
him appeared in The New Yorker. In 1969 Playboy magazine
published a lengthy interview with him.

 Sleeve note of “Understanding media”: “the most important book
ever written on communication. Ignore its message at your own
peril.”

 You can find a lot of material about McLuhan e.g. on the website:
http://www.mcluhanmedia.com


Marshall McLuhan
23

 “I don’t pretend to understand it. After all, my stuff is very difficult.”
 "I have no theories whatever about anything. I make observations by
way of discovering contours, lines of force, and pressures. I satirize
at all times, and my hyperboles are as nothing compared to the
events to which they refer.“
 “my purpose is to employ facts as tentative probes, as means of
insight, of pattern recognition, rather than to use them in the
traditional and sterile sense of classified data, categories,
containers. I want to map new terrain rather than chart old
landmarks. But I've never presented such explorations as revealed
truth.”


Marshall McLuhan
24

 If more people had read his books, many errors could have been
prevented and many of today‟s phenomenon could have been
anticipated; but nowadays his thoughts don‟t play the role in media
science discourse that they should deserve. He was often rejected
by “Real” scientists.
 He tried hard to find evidence for his thesis of “the medium is the
message”, i.e.: “the medium matters not the content”. In the end, he
found some evidence in experiments he conducted at General
Motors. Today, brain research proves a lot of his arguments to be
true.
 A lot of people seemed to have big problems with his convoluted
syntax, flushy metaphors and word-playful one-liners. It‟s more art
than science. However, his basic theses are relatively simple and
very clear.


Marshall McLuhan
25

 Many big companies asked him for advice, but
seldom acted on it:
• More than 30 years ago, General Motors paid him a
handsome fee for informing them that automobiles
were a thing of the past
• Bell Telephones paid a lot of money for being
explained by him that they didn‟t really understand the
function of the telephone
• Another big corporation asked him to predict – via
closed-circuit televisions – what their products will be
used for in the future (they didn‟t believe)


Warning!
26

 The following slides are more a collage of McLuhan quotes than a
presentation or lecture.
 I tried to collect them in order to make his basic arguments clear
 The expressions of his “theory” were not summarized in my own
words as I wanted to prevent messing up the real meaning,
because he partially wrote in a very poetic style
 For better reading I don‟t provide the exact source, but kept the
quotes in italics and my own remarks in standard font.
 Small changes in the structure of the sentence were not explicitly
marked. Color is added by me to emphasize important phrases
 Of course I am accountable for all errors
 I will concentrate mainly on presenting the theory and not on
criticizing it

Marshall McLuhan - Media
27

McLuhan has a very wide definition of media as “extensions
of men”
 Horses
 Weapons/Tools
 Clothing/Housing
 Drugs
 Clocks
 Railways
 Typography
 Slaves/Mechanical technologies
 Media (in the usual sense, e.g. Telegraph, Radio, TV, Computers)


Marshall McLuhan at a glance
28

 All Media – in and of themselves regardless of the messages they
communicate – exert a compelling influence of man and society (“The
media is the message”).
 Prehistoric, or tribal, man existed in a balance of sense, perceiving the
world equally through hearing, smell, touch, sight and taste
 “Media are extensions of men”. They amplify the body and/or
senses/central nervous system.
 Every basic innovation of media changes the sensory balance of man
– an alteration that, in turn, inexorably reshapes the society that
created the technology
 The influence depends on whether a “cold” or “hot” media meets a hot
or cold culture


The media is the message
29

 The content of a medium is always another medium (the
content of writing is speech, the written word is the
content of print, print is the content of telegraph etc.).

 The effect of the medium is quite independent from the
content.

 To those who have never studied media, this fact is quite
baffling as literacy to natives, who say: “Why do you
write? Can’t you remember?”


30

McLuhan uses the light bulb to explain the principle:
 The light bulb is a medium without content –

nevertheless it created a new environment by it’s mere
presence (create spaces during nighttime)

 It is not the light but the content that is noticed.
Whether light is being used for brain surgery
or night baseball is a matter of indifference
– it does not matter so much if you want to
understand how it controls and scale the form
of human association and action.


31

 The railway did not introduce movement or
transportation, or wheel or road into human society, but
it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human
functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new
kinds of work and leisure
 Later, a print mistake led McLuhan to use the sentence
“the medium is the massage”. He liked the message
because it met exactly what he wanted to say: that any
medium has a deep effect on the human sensorium,
they “massage” the sensorium.


32

 The content of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat
carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog
of the mind
 The effect of the medium is made strong and
intense just because it is given another medium
as “content”. The content of writing or print is speech,
but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print
or speech.
 The effects of technology do not occur at the level of
opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns
of perception steadily and without any resistance.


The „naive look“ on media
33

 General Sarnoff: “We are too prone to make technological
instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield
them. The products of modern science are not in themselves
good or bad; it is the way they are use that determines their
value.”
 McLuhan‟s comment: That is the voice of the current
somnambulism. Suppose we were to say “Apple pie is in
itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that
determines its value”. Or: “The smallpox virus is in itself
neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines
its value.” Again, “Firearms are in themselves neither good
nor bad; it is the way they are used that determines the
value.”…

The „naive look“ on media
34

 General Sarnoff went on to explain his attitude to the technology of
print, saying that it was true that print caused much trash to circulate,
but it has also disseminated the Bible and the thoughts of seers and
philosophers. It has never occurred to general Sarnoff that any
technology could do anything but add itself on to what we already are.
 It is true for many disciplines that we cannot understand what‟s going
on if we are “caught by content”: Economists as Robert Theobald,
W.W. Rostow and John Kenneth Galbraith have been explaining for
years how it is that “classical economics” cannot explain change or
growth (this is also why most media theory cannot explain media and
most communication theory cannot explain communication CH).
 Instead of asking which came first, the chicken or the egg, it suddenly
seemed that a chicken was an egg’s idea for getting more eggs.


The medium and the myth
35

 Every new medium or human extension creates a new
myth for itself, usually associated with a major figure:
Napoleon and the trauma of industrialism, Charlie
Chaplin as the public conscience of the movie, Florence
Nightingale as the first singer of human woe by
telegraph
 The artist is the only person able to encounter
technology with impunity, just because he is an expert
aware of the changes in sense perception


Media as extensions
36

 Electronic media are the ultimate extension of senses
because they involve again the whole apparatus of
senses and is more and more abolishing time and space
(global village) “…the simulation of consciousness when
the creative process of knowing will be collectively and
corporately extended to the whole of human society.”


Why do we need „extensions“?
37

 The three big dreams of mankind are:

• Security & love
• Immortality
• Almightiness


Extensions in fantasy
38

Spiderman: Organic extension


Explosion/Implosion
39

 After thousand years of explosion, by means of
fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western
world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had
extended our bodies in space.
 Today, after more than a century of electric technology,
we have extended our central nervous system itself in a
global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far
as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the
final phase of the extensions of man – the technological
simulation of consciousness.“ (1964 UM, p. 1)


How media affect the mind
40

 The mere existence of media configures our awareness
and experience on a very unconscious level, as
mentioned by the psychologist C.G. Jung:

“Every Roman was surrounded by slaves. The slave and
his psychology flooded ancient Italy, and every Roman
became inwardly, and of course unwittingly, a slave.
Because living constantly in the atmosphere of slaves,
he became infected through the unconscious with their
psychology. No one can shield himself from such an
influence” (Contributions to Analytical Psychology,
London 1928)


Narcissus narcosis
41

 Every extension is an intensification, an amplification of an organ,
sense or function, and whenever it takes place, the central
nervous system appears to institute a self-protective numbing of
the affected area, insulating and anesthetizing it from conscious
awareness of what's happening to it. It's a process rather like that
which occurs to the body under shock or stress conditions, or to
the mind in line with the Freudian concept of repression.
 I call this peculiar form of self-hypnosis or Narcissus narcosis, a
syndrome whereby man remains as unaware of the psychic and
social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims
in. As a result, precisely at the point where a new media-induced
environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our
sensory balance, it also becomes invisible.


Narcissus narcosis
42

 People are beginning to understand the nature of their new technology,
but not yet nearly enough of them - and not nearly well enough. Most
people, as I indicated, still cling to what I call the rearview-mirror view
of their world. By this I mean to say that because of the invisibility of
any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only
consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it; in other
words, an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been
superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step
behind in our view of the world.
 Because we are benumbed by any new technology--which in turn
creates a totally new environment - we tend to make the old
environment more visible; we do so by turning it into an art form and by
attaching ourselves to the objects and atmosphere that characterized it,
just as we've done with jazz, and as we're now doing with the garbage
of the mechanical environment via pop art.

Narcissus Narcosis
43

 At the height of the mechanical age, man turned back to
earlier centuries in search of "pastoral" values. The
Renaissance and the Middle Ages were completely oriented
toward Rome; Rome was oriented toward Greece, and the
Greeks were oriented toward the pre-Homeric primitives. We
reverse the old educational dictum of learning by proceeding
from the familiar to the unfamiliar by going from the unfamiliar
to the familiar, which is nothing more or less than the
numbing mechanism that takes place whenever new media
drastically extend our senses.
 In the midst of the electronic age of software, of instant
information movement, we still believe we're living in the
mechanical age of hardware.


Narcissus narcosis
44

 „There is no reason for any individual to have a Computer in
his home“ (Ken Olsen, CEO of Digital Equipment, 1977)

 This is a typical rumor; for all those quotes (also the one from
IBM-CEO Thomas Watson that there is no need for more
than 5 computers on earth) there are usually no hints for
actual existence! Nevertheless, the quote above contains
some truth – we can seldom estimate the real extent with
which a new medium changes the world

 For a differentiated view on the quote see:
http://snopes.com/quotes/kenolsen


„Hot“ and „cool“ media
45

 Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool
one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a
seminar, and a book less than a dialogue
 The principle that distinguishes hot and cold media is
perfectly embodied in the folk wisdom:“Men seldom
make passes at girls who wear glasses.” Glasses
intensify the outward-going vision, and fill in the feminine
image exceedingly. Dark glasses, on the other hand,
create the inscrutable and inaccessible image that
invites a great deal of participation and completion.


„Hot“ and „Cool“ Media
46

Hot Cool
Influence on •High definition •Low definition
senses •Low participation •High participation
•Enhances only one or few senses •Stimulates several senses

Traits •Don‟t have so much to be filled in or •Requires active participation
completed •Perception of abstract
•Analytical precision patterning
•Quantitative analysis •Simultaneous comprehension
•Sequential ordering of all parts

Examples •Movie •TV
•Photography •Comics
•Radio •Abstract art
•Lecture
•Speech

The impact of hot and cold media
47

 It makes all the difference whether a hot medium is used
in a hot or a cool culture.
 The hot radio medium e.g. used in cool or nonliterate
cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect in
England or America, where radio is felt as
entertainment.
 A cool or low literacy culture cannot accept hot media
like movies or radio as entertainment. They are, at least,
as radically upsetting for them as cool TV medium has
proved to be for our literacy world


The impact of hot media
48

Our brand is crisis (US movie, 2005)
 This film is a documentation about a US PR-consulting

company, which advised one of the eleven Bolivian
presidential candidates in 2002 during the election. The
consultants from Washington used all the art and tricks
of modern American campaigning-methods
 The candidate won the election but shortly after the

election bloody riots occurred in the streets of La Paz.
 The reason: We, in our literate, hot culture are used to

broken election campaign promises on TV. We accept
them as our world is fragmented


The impact of hot media
49

AP August 9, 1962: “Nearly 100 traffic violators watched a
police traffic accident film today to atone for their
violations. Two had to be treated for nausea and
shock…Viewers were offered a $5 reduction of fines if they
agreed to see the movie. It showed twisted wreckage and
mangled bodies and recorded the screams of accident
victims.”

The effect of hot media treatment cannot include much
empathy or participation at any time.


50

 Saturation: When all the available resources and
energies have been played up in and organism or in any
structure there is some kind of reversal pattern. The
spectacle of brutality used as deterrent can brutalize.
Brutality used in sports may humanize under some
conditions. But with regard to the bomb and retaliation
as deterrent, it is obvious that numbness is the result of
any prolonged terror…. The price of eternal vigilance is
indifference.


51

Headline for June 21, 1963: Washington-Moscow Hot line
installed
“The agreement to establish a direct communication line
between Washington and Moscow for emergencies was
signed here yesterday by Charles Stelle of the United
States and Semyon Tsarapkin of the Soviet Union…
The link, known a the hot line, will be opened within six
days, according to U.S. officials. It will make use of leased
commercials circuits, one cable and the other wireless,
teleprinter equipment.”


52

 McLuhan comments: “The decision, to use the hot
printed medium in place of the cool, participational,
telephone medium is unfortunate by extreme. No doubt,
the decision was prompted by the literary bias of the
Western for the printed form, on the ground that it is
more impersonal than the telephone.”
 Russians love the telephone which fits to their oral
traditions
 Invitation to monstrous misunderstandings
 The Russian bugs rooms and spies by ear, finding this
quite natural. He is outraged by our visual spying,
however, finding this quite unnatural


53

 Disruptive impact on societies of a hot technology:

Australian natives were given steel axes by the
missionaries. Their culture, based on the stone axe,
collapsed. It has not only been scarce but also a status
symbol of male importance. The missionaries provided
quantities of sharp steel axes and gave them to women
and children. The men had even to borrow these from
the women, causing a collapse of male dignity.


Narcissus Narcosis has positive functions
54

 Were we to accept fully and directly every shock to our
various structure of awareness, we would soon be
nervous wrecks doing double-takes and pressing panic
buttons every minute
 The “censor” protects our central system of values, as it
does our physical nervous system by simply cooling off
the onset experience a great deal (McLuhan was once asked
how to stop a war in a certain backward country and said it would
be the best to provide everybody with a TV)


The Tetrad
55


The Tetrad
56

 Laws of Media (1988), published posthumously by his son
Eric McLuhan summarized his ideas about media in a
concise tetrad of media effects for examining the effects on
society of any technology (i.e. any medium) by dividing its
effects into four categories and displaying them
simultaneously.
 McLuhan designed the tetrad as a pedagogical tool, phrasing
his laws as questions with which to consider any medium
 The laws of the tetrad exist simultaneously, not successively
or chronologically, and allow the questioner to explore the
"grammar and syntax" of the "language" of media.


The Tetrad
57

 McLuhan departs from his mentor Harold Innis in
suggesting that a medium "overheats", or reverses into
an opposing form, when taken to its extreme
 Visually, a tetrad can be depicted as four diamonds
forming an X, with the name of a medium in the center.
 The two diamonds on the left of a tetrad are the
Enhancement and Retrieval qualities of the medium,
both Figure qualities. The two diamonds on the right of a
tetrad are the Obsolescence and Reversal qualities,
both Ground qualities


The Tetrad
58

 What does the medium enhance?
 What does the medium make obsolete?
 What does the medium retrieve that had been
obsolesced earlier?
 What does the medium flip into when pushed to
extremes?


Example: the Radio
59

 Enhancement (figure): What the medium amplifies or
intensifies. Radio amplifies news and music via sound.
 Obsolescence (ground): What the medium drives out of
prominence. Radio reduces the importance of print and
the visual.
 Retrieval (figure): What the medium recovers which was
previously lost. Radio returns the spoken word to the
forefront.
 Reversal (ground): What the medium does when pushed
to its limits. Acoustic radio flips into audio-visual TV.


Clothing
62

Clothing and housing, as extensions of skin and heat-
control mechanisms, are media of communication, first of
all, in the sense that they shape and rearrange the
patterns of human association and community

Unclothed people use 40% more energy. Cloths enables human beings to
spread themselves in unfriendly areas and to protect themselves in fights


Housing
63

It’s obvious that houses are an extension of
mankind. They enable us to lead a comfortable
life. The pyramids or castles also had the function
to show the power of his owner.


Mirror
64

The story of the mirror is a main chapter in the history of
dress and manners and the sense of the self.


Mirror
65

Recently and imaginative school principal in a slum area
provided each student in the school with a photograph of
himself. The classroom of the school were abundantly
supplied with large mirrors. The result was an astounding
increase of learning.
The slum child has ordinarily very little visual orientation.
He does not see himself as becoming something. He does
not envisage distant goals and objectives. He is in his own
world from day to day, and can establish no beachhead in
the highly specialized sense life of visual man. The plight
of the slum kid, via TV image, is increasingly extended to
the entire population

Movement
66

 Transportation by pack animal (mostly women)
 Horseshoes and horse collars
 Wheel as the architect of new human relations
 Horse-drawn carts, busses and streetcars, first cities


Movement
67

 But the wheel was of little use without streets (the Roman
Empire was built on streets and papyrus)
 After the fall of the Roman Empire, it took centuries until
the streets were in a suitable condition again.
 In the 15th century they were used for the first time for
private postal services (Thurn & Taxis) and commercial
business (Fugger Family)


Movement
68

 Railway created new cities and suburbs and the first
stock corporations (and the first PR departments!). PR
should convince people to “Go West” an buy stocks. An
important means of PR has always been entertainment
business (Buffalo Bill, Circus Barnum)
 Still today, our language is full of words which have to do
with infrastructure of the age of Explosion: information
highway, communication channels, roadmap, building
bridges…
 The automobile ended the pedestrian or human scale of
the suburb (housewife as full-time chauffeur)


Movement
69

 Later the wheel was used for mechanical devices in many
forms
 In the electric age, the wheel itself is obsolete
 Each method of transporting commodity or information should have
come into existence in a bitter competitive battle against previously
existing devices. Each innovation is not only commercially
disrupting, but socially and psychologically corroding
 In the electric age, former media often look archaic, just outdated,
they don’t “feel good”
 But sometimes, old technologies have a comeback as
entertainment or arts: The car as vehicle will go the way of the
horse. The horse has lost its role in transportation but has made a
strong comeback in entertainment.


Movement
70

McLuhan wrote the following in 1964!!
 “At the heart of the car industry there are men who know

that the car is passing, as certainly as the cuspidor was
doomed when the lady typist arrived on the business
scene. What arrangements have they made to ease the
automobile industry off the center of the stage?
The mere obsolescence of the wheel does not mean its
disappearance. It means only that, like penmanship or
typography, the wheel will move into a subsidiary role in
the culture.”


From Oral Culture to Typography
71

 Body language, Gestures
 Narratives
 Informal/”natural” hierarchy
 Magic, mythical thinking
 Involves all senses!
 Acoustic more than visual (as in literal cultures)
 Still today, many cultures that are more oral than visual oriented,
e.g. the Russian
 Typical for today‟s oral cultures: The Hebrew and Eastern mode of thought
tackles problems and resolution, at the outset of a discussion. The entire message is
then traced and retraced, again and again, on the rounds of a concentric spiral with
seeming redundancy. One can stop anywhere after the first few sentences and have
the full message, if on is prepared to dig it. Spiral, concentric


Early writing
72

 Stone (heavy and unwieldy media) are time binders.
 Iconic writing; hieroglyphs


Early writing
73

 The alphabet was a drastic visual abstraction from the
rich hieroglyphic culture of the Egyptians, so it also
reduced and translated that culture into the great visual
vortex of the Graeco-Roman world.
 The alphabet was one thing when applied to clay or
stone, and quite another when set down on light
papyrus. The resulting leap in speed and space created
the Roman Empire
 The alphabet is a one-way-process of reduction of
nonliterate cultures into the specialist visual fragments of
our Western world (in religion setting: monistic religions)


Phonetic writing
74

 All non-phonetic forms of writing are artistic modes that
retain much variety of sensuous orchestration.
 Phonetic writing alone,
has the power of
separating and
fragmenting the sense
and of sloughing off
the semantic
complexities.


Typography
75

 Extension of the eye (“An eye for an ear”)
 The manuscript was cool,
print is a hot medium


Typography
76

 The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract
visual intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate
guilds and monasteries, creating extreme individualistic
patterns of enterprise and monopoly
 Hotting-up of the medium of writing to repeatable print
intensity led to nationalism and the religious wars of the
16th century (e.g. letters of indulgence; it also became
fashionable by protestants to print flyers to transport
religious messages).


Typography - consequences
77

 Individualism and nationalism in the 16th century
 Fragmentation
 Specialization/Segmentation
 Linear thinking
 Idea of time and space as continuous measurable quantities
 De-Sacralization of nature and power
 Homogeneity
 Repeatability
 Industrialism
 Mass markets
 Amplification of power, energy, and aggression

Typography
78

Repeatability:
 Margaret Mead has reported that when she brought several
copies of the same book to a Pacific island there was great
excitement. The natives had seen books, but only one copy
of each, which they had assumed to be unique.
 Their astonishment at the identical character of several books
was a natural response to what is after all the most magical
and potent aspect of print and mass production.


Typography
79

Homogeneity :
 De Tocqueville (1805-1859) explained in his work on the French
revolution how it was the printed word that, achieving cultural
saturation in the 18th century, had homogenized the French
nation.
 Frenchman were the same kind of people from north to south.
The typographic principles of uniformity, continuity, and linearity
had overlaid the complexities of ancient feudal and oral society.
The revolution was carried out by the new literati and lawyers


Typography
80

Homogeneity:
 De Tocqueville (1805-1859) remarked that the American Society
was more homogenized by print than England and much more than
Europe in general:
 “In America all laws derive in a sense from the same line of
thought. The whole society, so to speak, is founded upon a
single fact; everything springs from a simple principle. One could
compare America to a forest pierced by a multitude of straight
roads all converging on the same point. One has only to find the
center and everything is revealed at a glance. But in England,
the paths run criss-cross, and it is only by travelling down each
one of them that one can build up a picture of the whole.”


Typography
81

Homogeneity:
 Homogeneity of regions and nations (“nationalism was
unknown to the Western world until the Renaissance when
Gutenberg made it possible to see the mother tongue in
uniform dress”, e.g. Martin Luther translated the bible from
Latin to German)
 Homogeneity imposed pressure toward “correct” spelling,
syntax and pronunciation, right interpretation of standard
works and uniformity in speech and writing in general
 Homogeneity in clothing and all aspects of life
 William Whyte: Organization man (1951)


Typography
82

Homogeneity:
 When European used to visit America before the Second War
they would say “But you have communism here!” What they
meant was that we not only had standardized good, but
everybody had them.”
 “It was easy for the retribalized Nazis to feel superior to the
American consumer. The tribal man can spot the gaps in the
literate mentality very easily. On the other hand, it is the
special illusion of literate societies that they are highly aware
and individualistic”


Typography
83

Fragmentation/Efficiency:
 In the World War I an II, the U.S. accumulated enormous
amounts of wealth which was the basis for big business
(Fordism and Taylorism arose from the big North American
plants) => first assembly lines, “efficiency craze”


The Gutenberg-Galaxy
84

The sense of smell is not only the most subtle
in that it involves the culture human
sensorium more fully than any
other sense. It is not surprising,
therefore that highly literate
societies take steps to reduce or
eliminate odors from the
environment. It is far too involving
for our habits of detachment and
specialist attention.


The Gutenberg-Galaxy
85

Reflections of the industrial age in arts:
 Acrobat: the acrobat acts as a specialist, using only a limited
segment of his faculties. The clown is the integral man who
mimes the acrobat in an elaborate drama of incompetence
 Example: Charlie Chaplin: Modern times (1936)


Typography
86

 The “power” of words disseminated by print does not lie
in the words “itself” but in the medium (the medium is
the message)
 “Das hab ich gettruckt gesechenn, das soll ein warhaytt
sein” (the frequent traveler Dynoysius Dreytwein,
ca.1500, source: Borst 1983, p. 558)
 Inadequacy of words is never recognized by the
literate man: All the words in the world cannot describe
an object like a bucket, although it is possible to tell in a
few words how to make a bucket


Typography
87

The invention of “work”:
 Work does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter
or fisherman did not work, any more does the poet, painter, or
thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no
work. Work begins with the division of labor and the
specialization of functions and tasks in sedentary, agricultural
communities. In the electric age the “job of work” yields to
dedication.
 To discipline workers, enormous effort was needed
 Impersonality
 The brain was left behind at the factory door
 Leisure alone meant a life of human dignity and involvement of
the whole man.


Typography
88

 In a highly literate society man sees others who cannot
perform somewhat pathetic. Especially the child, the
cripple, the woman, and the colored person appear in a
world of visual and typographic technology as victims of
injustices.
 In a culture that assigns roles instead of jobs to people –
the dwarf, the skew, the child create their own spaces,
people are not expect to fit in some uniform and
repeatable niche that is not their size anyway.


Typography
89

 Oppression of Emotions: Example: the Victorian age (1837-1901)
was a period of flourishing economy but also heavy repressing of
individual feelings.
 In a visual and highly literate culture, when we meet person for the
first time his visual appearance dims out the sound of the name, so
that in self-defense we add: “How do you spell your name?” In an ear
culture, the sound of a man’s name is the overwhelming fact
 In the mechanical age with industrial specialism and fragmentation,
any intense experience must be “forgotten”, “censored”, and reduced
to a very cool state before it can be “learned” or “assimilated”.
Example: The hot literary medium excludes the practical and participant
aspect of the joke completely. To literary people, the practical joke with
its total physical involvement is distasteful . A lot of dances were “cooled
down” so that they could be danced in the Western world.


Typography
90

 It is typical for periods of intense mechanization,
fragmentation and aggressive expansion (e.g.
Colonialism, wars) that arts (theater drama etc.), gaming,
hobbies, leisure activities, alcohol and paranormal events,
prostitution, are flourishing
 Games are a medium and a mirror of society
 Play for example has the function of “cooling down” hot
cultures (panem et circensis). Play cools off the hot
situation of actual life by miming competitive sports, more
or less brutal (Big Brother, DSDS; CH)


Typography
91

 Literate man naturally dreams of visual solutions to the
problems of human differences. At the end of the 19th
century, this kind of dream suggested similar dress and
education for both men and women. The failure of the
sex-integration programs have provided the theme of
much of the literature and psychoanalysis of the 20th
century.
 Race integration, undertaken on the basis of visual
uniformity, is an extension of the same cultural strategy
of literate man, for whom differences always seem to
need eradication, both in sex and in space and in time.


What European eyes see!

- Chaos -
- Contrast -
- Confusion -

What Indian eyes see!

- Change -
- Challenge -
- Confidence -

Typography – the advantages of literacy
96

 These typographical matters for many people are charged with
controversial values. Yet in any approach to understanding print
it is necessary to stand aside from the form in question if its
typical pressure and life to be observed. Those who panic now
about the threat of newer media and about the revolution we are
forging, vaster in scope than that of Gutenberg, are obviously
lacking in cool visual detachment and gratitude for that most
potent gift bestowed on Western man by literacy and
typography: his power to react without reaction or involvement.
 It is this kind of specialization by dissociation that has created
Western power and efficiency. Without this dissociation of action
from feeling and emotion people are hampered and hesitant.
Print taught men to say: “Damp the torpedos. Full steam ahead!”


Money
97

Robinson Crusoe (story by Daniel Defoe, 1719)
frequently observes that the money he rescued from
the ship is worthless on his islands, especially when
compared to his tools


Money
98

 Money is an institution based on beliefs
 Money has reorganized the sense life of peoples just
because it is an extension of our sense lives. It creates
social and spiritual values, as happens even in fashions.
 Money began in nonliterate cultures as a commodity, such as
whales’ teeth on Fiji, were valued as luxury, and thus became
a means of mediation or barter.
 The existence of money is often seen as a sign of maturity (in
a society): Speech comes at the end of the first year with the
development of the power to let go of objects. Currency is a
way of letting go of the immediate staples and commodities
(Freud’s Concept of Anal Erotism)


Money
99

 Nonliterate societies are quite lacking in the psychic
resources to create and sustain the enormous structures
of statistical information that we call markets and prices
 “Money talks” because money is a metaphor, a transfer,
and a bridge, Like word and language, money is a
storehouse of communally achieved work, skill, and
experience


Money
100

 It is difficult to describe the development of money as the
most powerful institution of our days
 McLuhan provides an interesting historical overview of the
development of money as a medium from mercantilism to
modern markets
 An important media for expansion and finally industrialization
were interests, as most religions did at first not accept
“earning money with money”. The first banks were founded
in Italy to finance war and trade in the Mediterranean area.
The first international corporation, the Fugger empire, was
based on trade with indulgences in the name of the Pope.
The Fugger family also financed the German emperor
Maximilian.

Money
101

 I want to concentrate on some psychological and social
consequences of money described by McLuhan
 Money is a specialist technology like writing; as writing
intensifies the visual aspect of speech and order, and the
clock visually separates time from space
 Like writing, money has an enormous power to separate
functions, it translates and reduces one kind of work to
another.
 In a highly literate, fragmented society, “Time is money”,
and money is the store of other people’s time and effort.
Even in the Electronic age it has lost none of its power


Money
102

 “The penetration of the money economy (in Japan)
caused a slow, but irresistible revolution, culminating in
the breakdown of feudal government and the resumption
of intercourse with foreign countries after more than two
hundred years of seclusion.” (G.B. Sansom, In Japan
1931)
 Which senses get numbed by money?


Money
103

 One of the inevitable results of acceleration of information
movement and of the translating power of money is the opportunity
of enrichment for those who can anticipate this transformation by a
few hours or years, as the case may be. We are particularly familiar
today with examples of enrichment by
means of advance
information in stocks and
bonds and real estate.
 In the past, when wealth
was not so obviously related
information, and entire class
could monopolize the wealth
resulting from a casual shift in
technology.”


Money
104

 The dynamics which is basic to crowds is the urge to
rapid an unlimited growth. The same power dynamic
is characteristic of large concentration of wealth or
treasure.
 With the increase of money in a few hands also the
breed uneasiness is growing that goes with wealth
about disintegration and deflation.


Clocks
106

 Writing on Communication in Africa, Leonard Doob observes. „The
turban, the sword and nowadays the alarm clock are worn or carried
to signify high rank.“ Presumably it will be rather long before the
African will watch the clock in order to be punctual.
 Just as a great revolution in mathematics came when positional,
tandem numbers were discovered (302 instead of 32), so great
cultural changes occurred in the West when it was found possible to
fix time as something that happens between two points. From this
application of visual, abstract, and uniform units came our Western
feeling for time as duration


Clocks
107

 A sense of impatience when we cannot endure the delay
between events, is unknown among nonliterate cultures.
 The clock preceded the printing press in the influence on the
mechanization of society: In the medieval ages, the
communal clock extended to the bell permitted high
coordination of energies in small communities


Clocks
108

It was the world of the medieval monasteries, with their need for
a rule and for synchronized order to guide communal life, that
the clock got started on its modern developments. Time
measured not by the uniqueness of private experience but by
abstract uniform units gradually pervades all sense life, much as
does the technology of writing and printing. Not only work, but
also eating and sleeping, came to accommodate themselves to
the clock rather than to organic needs.


Clocks
109

As a piece of technology, the clock is a machine that
produces seconds, minutes, and hours on an assembly-
line pattern. Processed in this uniform way, time is
separated from the rhythms of human experience. The
mechanical clock, in short, helps to create the image of a
numerically quantified and mechanically powered
universe.

Clock in/out


Clocks
110

Travelers today have the daily experience of being at one
hour in a culture that is still 3000 B.C. and the next hour in
a culture that is 1900 A.D.


Clocks
111

In the Electronic age:
 Time and space interpenetrate each other totally in a

space-time-world (ugly word:“real-time”)
 In the space-time world of electronic technology, the

older mechanical time begins to feel unacceptable, if
only because it is uniform.


Space
112

Our literate, Western Concept of space is very different
than that of the natives. In fact, ours is a “rational” space:
 Nigerians studying in American universities are

sometimes asked to identify spatial relations. Confronted
with objects in sunshine, they are often unable to
indicate in which direction shadows will fall, for this
involves casting into three-dimensional perspective.
Thus sun, objects, and observer are experienced
separately and regarded as independent of one another.


Space
113

An anthropological film showed a Melanesian carver
cutting out a drum which such skill, coordination, and ease
that the audience several times broke into applause – it
became a song, a ballet. But when the anthropologist
asked the tribe to build crates to ship these carvings in,
they struggled unsuccessfully for three days to make two
planks intersect a 90-degree angle, then gave up in
frustration. They couldn’t crate what they had created


Space
114

In the low definition world of the medieval woodcut, each
object created its own space, and there was no rational
connected space into which it must fit.


Space
115

 A the retinal impression is intensified, objects cease to
cohere in a space of their own making, and instead,
become “contained” in a uniform, continuous, and
“rational” space.
 Relativity theory in 1905 announced the
dissolution of uniform Newtonian space
as an illusion or fiction, however useful.
Einstein pronounced the doom of
continuous or “rational” space, and the
way was made clear for Picasso, the
Marx Brothers and MAD


Radio
116

 “The Tribal drum”
 Radio is an extension not only of the ear but of the
central nervous system (of the aural, high-fidelity
photography of the visual) and a hot medium


Radio
117

The Eye is cool and detached. The Ear is hypersensible.
The ear turns man over to universal panic while the eye,
extended by literacy and mechanical time, leaves some
gaps and some islands free from the unremitting pressure
and reverberation


Radio
118

The case of Orson Wells famous “The War of the Worlds” (broadcasted on 30.10.1938)
 Some listeners heard only a portion of the broadcast, and in the atmosphere of tension
and anxiety leading to World War II, took it to be a news broadcast. Newspapers
reported that panic ensued, people fleeing the area, others thinking they could smell
poison gas or could see flashes of lightning in the distance.
 Richard J. Hand cites studies by unnamed historians who "calculate[d] that some six
million heard the CBS broadcast; 1.7 million believed it to be true, and 1.2 million were
'genuinely frightened'". While Welles and company were heard by a comparatively small
audience (in the same period, NBC's audience was an estimated 30 million), the uproar
was anything but minute: within a month, there were 12,500 newspaper articles about
the broadcast or its impact, while Adolf Hitler cited the panic, as Hand writes, as
"evidence of the decadence and corrupt condition of democracy.“
 Later studies suggested this "panic" was less widespread than newspapers suggested.
During this period, many newspapers were concerned that radio, a new medium, would
make them defunct. In addition, this was a time of yellow journalism, and as a result,
journalists took this opportunity to demonstrate the dangers of broadcast by
embellishing the story, and the panic that ensued, greatly.


Radio
119

 In a radio speech in Munich, March 14, 1936, Hitler said, “I go my
way with the assurance of a somnambulist.” His victims and critics
have been equally somnambulistic
 That Hitler came into political existence at all is directly owing to
radio. This is not to say that this media
relayed his thoughts effectively to the
German people. His thoughts were of little
consequence. Radio provided the first
massive experience of electronic implosion,
that reversal of the entire direction and
meaning of literate Western Civilization.

Public address system
(Volksempfänger)


Radio
120

For tribal peoples, for those whose entire social existence
is an extension of family life, radio will continue to be a
violent experience. Highly literate societies, that have long
subordinated family life to individualistic stress in business
and politics, have managed to absorb and to neutralize the
radio implosion without revolution.
Not so, those communities that have only brief or
superficial experience of literacy. For them, radio is utterly
explosive.


Radio
121

 Radio has an enormous power to retribalize man.
 It affects most people intimately, person-to-person,
offering a world of unspoken between writer-speaker and
the listener. That is the immediate aspect of radio. A
private experience. The subliminal depths of radio are
charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and
antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this
medium with its power to turn the psyche and society into
a single echo.


Radio
122

Just prior 1914, the Germans had become obsessed with the
menace of “encirclement”. Their neighbors had all developed
elaborate railway systems that facilitated mobilization of
manpower resource. Encirclement is a highly visual image that
had great novelty for this newly industrialized nation. In the
1930s, by contrast, the German obsession was with
Lebensraum. This is not a visual concern, at all. It is a
claustrophobia, engendered by the radio implosion and
compression of space.
The German defeat had thrust them back from visual obsession
into brooding upon the resonating within. The tribal past has
never ceased to be a reality for the German psyche.


Radio
123

 It was the ready access of the German and middle-European
world to the rich nonvisual resources of auditory and tactile form
that enabled them to enrich the world of music and dance and
sculpture. Above all their tribal mode gave them easy access to
the new nonvisual world of subatomic physics, in which long-
literate and long-industrialized societies are decidedly
handicapped.


Radio
124

The power to retribalize mankind, its almost instant reversal of
individualism into collectivism, Fascist, or Marxist, has gone
unnoticed. So extraordinary is this unawareness that it is what
needs to be explained. The transforming power of media is easy
to explain, but the ignoring of this power is not at all easy to
explain.
It goes without saying that the universal ignoring of the psychic
action of technology bespeaks some inherent function, some
essential numbing of consciousness such as occurs under
stress and shock conditions.


Radio
125

 The Teenagers in the 1950s began to manifest many of
the tribal stigmata


Radio
126

 For Africa, India, China, and even Russia, radio is a profound
archaic force, a time bond with the most ancient past and
long-forgotten experience
 If we sit and talk in a dark room, words suddenly acquire new
meanings and different textures. They become richer, even,
than architecture which Le Corbusier rightly said can be best
felt at night
 All those gestural qualities that the printed page strips from
language come back in the dark, and on the radio. Given only
the sound of a play, we have to fill in all of the sense, not just
the sight of the action. (as a cool medium, radio has mystic
qualities)


Radio
127

The impact of Radio/TV on political careers:
It was no accident that Senator McCarthy lasted such a very short time
when he switched to TV. Soon the press decided, “He isn’t news any
more”. Neither McCarthy nor the press ever knew what had happened.
TV is a cool medium. It rejects hot figures and hot issues and people.
Had TV occurred on a large scale during Hitler’s reign, he would have
vanished quickly. When Khrushchev appeared on American TV he was
more acceptable than Nixon, as a clown and a lovable sort of old boy.


Radio
128

The impact of Radio/TV on political careers:
In the Kennedy-Nixon debates (1960), those who heard them on
radio received an overwhelming idea of Nixon’s superiority. It
was Nixon’s fate to provide a sharp, high-definition image and
action for the cool TV that translated that sharp image into the
impression of a phony. I suppose “phony” is something that
resonates wrong, that doesn’t ring true


Radio
129

 The Radio was invented by amateurs and just like the
telegraph, which was used for lotteries and games in general
without any commercial interests existed in isolation from any
commercial commitment.
 There was reluctance and opposition from the world of press,
which, in England led to the formation of BBC and the firm
shackling of radio by newspaper and advertising interests.
The restrictive pressure by the press on radio and TV is still a
hot issue in Britain and Canada
 With radio came great changes to press, to advertising, to
drama and poetry. Radio offered a new scope to practical
jokers, created the disc jockey. For commercial interests, the
radio had to settle more and more for “entertainment” as a
strategy of neutrality


Radio
130

While radio contracts the world to village size, and creates
insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumor, and personal malice,
it hasn’t the effect of homogenizing the village quarters. Quite
the contrary. In India, where radio is the supreme form of
communication, there are more than a dozen official languages
and the same number of radio networks.
The effect of radio as a reviver of archaism and ancient
memories is not limited to Hitler’s Germany. Ireland, Scotland
and Wales have undergone resurgence of their ancient tongues
since the coming of radio, and the Israeli present an even more
extreme instance of linguistic revival. They now speak a
language which has been dead in books for centuries.


Mc luhan 1

More Related Content

What's hot

Viewers also liked

Similar to Mc luhan 1

Recently uploaded

Mc luhan 1