Marshall “Media” McLuhan
&
The Invisible Environment
or
Fish don’t know water exists until beached.

 

The present is always invisible because it is environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.

The new environment of mankind is scarcely “hardware” or physical so much as it is information and the configurations of codified data.

The new media are not bridges between man and nature; they are nature.

The new media are not ways of relating us to the old “real” world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.

I believe that our survival, and at least our comfort and happiness, is predicated on understanding the nature of our new environment because unlike previous environmental changes, the electronic media constitute a total and near-instantaneous transformation of culture, value and attitudes.

This upheaval generates great pain and identity loss, which can be ameliorated only through a conscious awareness of its dynamics. If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves.

The environment is always the brainwasher, so that the well-adjusted person, by definition, has been brainwashed.

Since in any situation 10 percent of the events cause 90 percent, we ignore the 10 percent and are stunned by the 90 percent. Without an anti-environment, all environments are invisible. The role of the artist is to create anti-environments as means of perception and adjustment. Hamlet’s sleuth technique for coping with the hidden environment around him was that of an artist: “As I perchance hereafter shall think meet to put on anti disposition on . . .” (Hamlet, Act I, Scene V)

The great betrayal of Art was that artists surrendered their autonomy and had become flunkies of power, as the atomic physicist at the present moment is the flunky of war lords.

 

Emperor’s New Clothes

Today man has developed extension for practically everything he used to do with his body. The evolution of weapons begins with the teeth and fist and ends with the atom bomb. Clothes and houses are extension of man’s biological temperature-control mechanism. Furniture takes the place of squatting and sitting on the ground. Power tools, glasses, TV, telephones, and books which carry the voices across both time and space are examples of material extension. Money is a way of extending and storing labor. Our transportation networks now do what we used to do with our feet and backs. In fact, all man-made material things can be treated as extensions of what man once did with his body or some specialized part of his body. (Edward T. Hall, The Silent Language)

       Their advantages are:

(a) They have no need of constant nourishment, thus saving energy.

(b) They can be discarded or stored rather than carried (a further savings of energy)

(c) They are exchangeable, enabling man to specialize and to play multiple roles: when carrying a spear, he can be a hunter, or with a paddle he can move across the sea.

(d) All of these instruments can be shared communally.

(e) They can be made in the community by “specialists” (giving rise to handicrafts).                 

- Hans Hass, The Human Animal

 

The primary method for studying the effects of anything is simply to imagine ourselves as suddenly deprived of them. If students were to interview physically deprived people about the effects on them of living in a world which has no place for the paraplegic, or blind man, they would quickly apprehend the menace of our manmade service environment.

 

The Medium is the Message

In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.[1]

But most people, from truck drivers to the literary Brahmins, are still blissfully ignorant of what the media do to them; unaware that because of their pervasive effects on man, it is the medium itself that is the message, not the content, and unaware that the medium is also the massage[2] - that, all puns aside, literally works over and saturates and molds and transforms every sense ratio.

The mechanical clock, for example, created a wholly artificial image of time as a uniform linear structure. This artificial form gradually changed habits of work, feeling and thought which are only being rejected today. We know that in own lives each event exists in its own time. Time is not the same for the speaker as for the audience. To the speaker it is too, too brief for what he has to say. For the audience it is a grim foretaste of eternity. Ultimately the medieval clock made Newtonian physics possible.

 

Culture is Our Business

Language: The mother tongue is propaganda. The great and abiding mass medium is not literature but speech. Language is at once the most vulgar of all media and the greatest work of art that ever can be devised by man.

Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.

 

Alphabet: Fracturing of the integrity of the word. The phonetic alphabet is unique in being formed by phonemes, or meaningless bits. All other alphabets consist mainly of morphemes, or meaningful bits. The extreme abstraction or meaning from the formal sign . . . releases the visual faculty from its embodiment in the other senses. In separation from sound and touch and semantics, both Euclid and logic become simultaneously possible.

To capture the dynamics of the phonetic flux or flash in a fixed visual net – that was the achievement of our alphabet. This net proved to be unique. In that net the Western world took all other cultures. No other culture originally took the step of separating the sounds of words from their meanings and then of translating the sound into sight.

 

Writing: the spatialization of thought. Writing was the break-through from sound to sight. But with the end of the acoustic wall came chronology, tick-tock time, architecture & the visual analysis of the dynamic logos that produced philology, logic, rhetoric, geometry, etc.

Writing, the enclosure of speech and sound space, split off song and dance and music from speech. It split off harmonia from mimesis.

Plato, in Phaedrus, “This discovery of yours, [writing], will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence and you give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

Writing gives control over space. Writing produces at once the city. The power to shape space in writing brings the power to organize space architecturally. And when messages can be transported, then come the road, armies, and empires. The empires of Alexander and the Caesars were essentially built by paper routes.

 

Printing: The Gutenberg galaxy. The printed page is a 16th century art form which obliterated two thousand years of manuscript culture in a few decades. The manuscript reader automatically found it easier to memorize all he read than refer again and again to this form. Until print, readers carried their lore at the tips of their tongues. Yet it is hard for us to see the printed page or any other cultural medium except in contrast to some other form. The mechanization of writing was as revolutionary in its consequences as the mechanization of time.

Movable type was already the modern assembly line in embryo.

With print from moveable type came fast, silent reading.

Print knocked down the monastic walls of social and corporate study. The Bible: religion without walls. Victor Hugo wrote once that the printed book took over the part played by the cathedral in the Middle Ages and became the carrier of the spirit of the people. But the thousands of books tore the one spirit . . . into thousands of opinions . . . tore the church into a thousand books. (Bela Balaz – Theory of Film)

But print isolated the scholar. It created the enterprising individual who, like Marlove’s Tamburlaine or Dr. Faustus, could over-run time and history and cultures and peoples.

It upset the monopoly of Latin by making possible multi-lingual study.

It fostered the vernaculars and enlarged the walls between nations.

It speeded up language, thereby setting new walls between speech and song, and song and instrumentation.

Print led to spoken poetry and silently read poetry, thus change the nature of verse entirely.

Printed music entirely changed the structures of musical forms.

In America print was a technological matrix of all subsequent invention. Its assembly-lines finally reached expression in Detroit and the motor-car: the home without walls.

In America the press molded public opinion and created a new base for politics.

The press was a means of mobilizing opinion and made national road systems.

The press became in large measure a substitute for the book. But the press page is not the book page. The press creates new mental habits.

 

Press: The proud motto “All the news that’s fit to print” advertises the fact that news is actually a fiction. From the initial selection of experiences to be written up, to the arbitrary selection of items to be read by the reader as scanner, there is a large factor of choice in looking at the world itself as something fit to print.

The modern newspaper is a magical institution like the rainmaker. It is written to release feelings and to keep us in a state of perpetual emotion. It is not intended to provide rational schemes or patterns for digesting the news. It never provides insights into events, but merely the thrill of event.

The reader of the newspaper accepts the newspaper not so much as a highly artificial image having some correspondence to reality as he tends to accept it as reality itself. Perhaps the effect is for the media to substitute for reality just in the degree to which they become virtuosos of realistic detail.

 

Telegraph: With telegraph only vernacular walls remain. All other cultural walls collapse under the impact of its instantaneous flash.

The telegraph translates writing into sound. The electrification of writing was almost as big a step back towards the acoustic world as those steps since taken by telephone, radio, TV.

 

Telephone: speech without walls.

 

Phonograph: music hall without walls.

 

Photograph: museum without walls

The photograph has reversed the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.

 

Movies: I can only regard the movie as the mechanization and distortion of the cognitive miracle by which we recreate the exterior world. But whereas cognition provides the dance of the intellect which is the analogical sense of Being, the mechanical medium has tended to provide merely a dream world which is a substitute for reality rather than a means of proving reality.

 

TV: The TV screen just pours that energy into you which paralyses the eye; you are not looking at it; it is looking at you.

 

Computers: “Come into my parlor,” said the computer to the specialist.

The computer is able to take over the whole mechanical age. Everything that was done under mechanical conditions can be computerized with relative ease, and that includes our educational system.

 

Internet: The unconscious is a store of everything at once. When you begin to move information electronically, you begin to create a subconscious outside.

As we transfer our whole being to the data bank, privacy will become a ghost or echo of its former self and what remains of community will disappear.

 

Control: Power & control are in all cases paid for by loss of freedom and flexibility.

Albert Speer, Speech at Nuremburg trials -

“The telephone, the teleprinter and the wireless made it possible for orders from the highest levels to be given direct to the lowest levels, where, on account of the absolute authority behind them, they were carried out uncritically; or brought it about that numerous offices and command centers were directly connected with the supreme leadership from which they received their sinister orders without any intermediary; or resulted in a widespread  surveillance of the citizen, or in a high degree of secrecy surrounding criminal happenings. To the outside observer this governmental apparatus may have resembled the apparently chaotic confusion of line at a telephone exchange, but like the latter it could be controlled and operated from one central source. Former dictatorships needed collaborators of high quality even in the lower levels of leadership, men who could think and act independently. In the era of modern technique an authoritarian system can do without this. The means of communication alone permit it to mechanize the work of subordinate leadership. As a consequence a new type develops: the uncritical recipient of orders.”[3]

 

Jericho

       The walls have come tumbling down.

The walls that hold in, the walls that hold out.

It is now obvious that as all languages are mass media, so the new media are the new languages. To unscramble our Babel we must teach these languages and their grammars on their own terms, not in the terms of the public educational systems.

The classroom is now a place of detention, not attention. Attention is elsewhere.

The young today reject goals – they want roles.