This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison, and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
Welcome back to our thought sanctuary friends.
Welcome back to the hot cold medium of entitled opinions.
Conventional wisdom tells us that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion.
Hmm. Yeah. Okay.
Well, let's just say that on this show everyone is entitled to my opinions,
as well as the opinions of my guests.
But we'll go further than that on this fine summer day and declare that our order
will now grant titles to all of you who listen to this program on a regular basis.
That's right. If you're bold enough for this show,
if you can breathe the rarefied air on our Mount Olympus,
if you are committed to free thinking, if you pledge to defend the tower against the
battering rams of present day inanity, we do hereby W a night of the order of entitled opinions,
a shuvalyay of the cosmic table at which we carry on our conversation of the ages
in this other kingdom where power comes from thought and sovereignty from reflection.
Where no queen is weeping and no king has no wife.
So as everybody in, is everybody in, the nighting ceremony is about to begin.
[Music]
I'm not a big fan of the Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan,
but the New York Times recently published quotes from various graduation speeches
that were delivered around the country this year, and the only one that jumped out at me from the
sappy dozen or so was from Noonan's address to the Catholic University of America. I quote,
"Almost everyone involved in politics now is getting dumber. They're getting lost in a sea of
dum. They may drown in it. People in politics now are getting what they know through the internet,
through Google searches and Wikipedia. These can give you a certain sense of things,
but are by nature quick, lifeless, and shallow reads that link to other quick, dry,
and shallow reads that everyone else has to read. It all becomes a big, lying loop."
Well, that sounds like an entitled opinion to me.
[Music]
I read that quote from Peggy Noonan only because it makes a connection between the way a class of
people think, or in this case don't think, and the prevailing media of our age. I mean the internet,
Google searches, cell phones, Twitter feeds, and all the other prosthesis of our contemporary
sensory ratio. It's not a particularly subtle connection Noonan makes, but it sets things up for
today's show, which is about the way media inform and infuse almost every action and interaction
in human society. The way media structure and determine our perception, the way they configure our
experience of the world, if not our very being in the world, and the way media interconnect us all.
I don't know if the medium is the message or the message is the medium, or speaking of Wikipedia,
whether Wikipedia gets it right when it defines media as, I quote, "the collective communication
outlets or tools that are used to store and deliver information or data."
I suspect that our relation to reality is so thoroughly overmediated these days that the word media
in the 21st century refers to something fundamentally distinct or different from communication
technologies of the past. The medium is the message means something different today than it did in
Petrox time when the sonnet form was the message of the collection of words it conveyed.
These days our minds and sense perception are thoroughly absorbed, incorporated,
or uploaded into the prevailing media. Even when we're not looking at a screen,
the screen is doing the looking for us. And the thinking too, if it can't make it onto a screen,
it's not real. Heidegger was onto something when he claimed that the essence of
the digital platforming, processing, and patterning of our age. Today being is in
frame by a different kind of machination than the one that gave us the power plant on the
Rhine. Today we all live in Electric Fairyland. This fairyland is decidedly not the Electric Ladyland
that Jimi Hendrix beckoned us to some 50 years ago.
We live in Electric Ladyland. The magic of the place for you, so don't be amazed.
Oh, I want you to give brought in patience. I want to try to sound patience. That true woman waits for you and me. So it's time we take a ride. We can pass going in. I'm stuck with a saucy.
Wow, we fly right over the lovely sea. Look up ahead. I see the love man. Soon you are the star.
Yeah, that's Jimi's full bodied lady land, a place of different emotions, of a new sensorial
planetude, new sounds and motion that await us across the sea. In our fairyland, we get mega bites
instead of magic, LCDs instead of electric love, a cell phone screen instead of the five-fold
planet of God's mortal's earth, wind and fire. I mentioned that today we're going to talk about the way media inform the functioning and mentalities of human society, the way they determine our basic modes of perception, how they structure our modes of being in the world, and how they interconnect our global village.
Those who are familiar with the work of Marshall McLuhan, the great founder of media studies, author of understanding media, the Gutenberg galaxy and other ground breaking books, will recognize in our topic some of the core assumptions of his media theory, which holds that media are present, indeed omnipresent in every human society, and that they more than any other forces regulate how and what we think, how and what we know, how and what we know,
what we feel, how and what we perceive. Marshall McLuhan died in 1980. Many of us wish he were still around because we would be eager to get his thoughts about the internet, the smartphone and the social media of our electric fairyland. We may not be able to query Marshall directly, but I have someone in the studio today who is more than entitled to speak on his behalf, not only because he is the son of Marshall McLuhan, but because he too has devoted his adult life to
thinking and writing about media and what he calls media ecology, and to extending his father's thought forward into our own times. Eric McLuhan joins me today on KZSU, along with his son Andrew McLuhan, and it's a pleasure to host them both on entitled opinions. Eric and Andrew, welcome.
Thank you, Robin.
Thank you.
So let me mention before we jump into our conversation that this show was made possible by one of the listeners or fans of this show, Eli Kanell, who visited me last year, he was in the Bay Area, and we had coffee together.
He is a huge enthusiast of Marshall McLuhan's work and had studied McLuhan in college and urged me to do a show on him. And he is the one who alerted me to the fact that you, Eric, along with Andrew, are here in the Bay Area to participate in the conference in
the first round. And I'm going to have a talk about media. That is, yes. Yeah, so I want to send out a thanks to Eli Kanell for making this possible. Let me also mention for our listeners that this is one of the few shows I've done without having met my guest beforehand without having plotted how we're going to proceed beforehand. You know, we just met some 20 minutes, half an hour ago at the most, so we're going to not follow any kind of prescribed itinerary in our discussion. That makes it more fun, doesn't it?
It does. And I'm quite fascinated Eric with the work that you've done, you know, independently of the promotion and if I could call it a "pustolic work" for the theories of your father.
But I'm also quite intrigued by -- you followed in your father's footsteps and so far as you got a degree in literature. I think you did a PhD in literature. You have one book on James Joyce, which was the author that your father
did a lot of work on as well. And you're the author of Electric Language, which came out in 1998, the role of Thunder in Finnegan's Wake.
Right.
And I have to read that one because if for no other reason, because I'm a Vico scholar and I can imagine that the Thunder there connects to Vico.
It does. Good. And the sense was Comunis, Sinesthesia and the Soul and Odyssey, all these titles sound very intriguing to someone like me. So could you say just a word about your own work before you've been here?
Well, when my father died, he and I had been working together for about 15 years and he left a whole lot of things unfinished. And so one of the things I've been doing in the last few years is finishing some of those unfinished books and also chasing down some of the aspects of what he was doing and using as tools in the work and which everybody misunderstand.
And the sense is Comunis is one of those. His theory of media, his idea of media was in a large part an examination of how the media extend and alter our sense of real lives.
Each new technology extends some of the senses with the faculties. But in doing that, it drives some of the others down.
And the consequences, it changes the way we imagine, the way we think. But there's a faculty inside us called the Common Sense.
Now that has to great medieval notion, but yeah, well, many evolution came straight out of Aristotle who along with everybody else until about a hundred years ago said, well, we have five senses.
And they are always in communion with each other in conversation. I like to talk about the Census Communis as the faculties club.
They said, with various faculties get together and gossip and chat and kid each other and help each other and fight each other all in a friendly way otherwise we die.
And the operating system for the faculties club, the Census Communis is synesthesia.
Synesthesia is something that we associate with a commingling of the senses and a kind of promiscuous overlapping of one into the other.
That's the faculty club.
That's a faculty club, although it is important ordinarily to keep them distinct enough that they, so that synesthesia becomes almost like, as you know, the poetics of Buddha there.
When you go to the same, you go to the same spot.
You go to the same spot.
So you go to the same spot.
You go to the same spot.
So you go to the same spot.
You're talking about in general for all people.
No, just for a synostease.
And it's common across all of them.
We all have it, but only a small group of people are aware of it.
They're called synostease.
Right.
So I'm very fascinated by this notion.
So Hambou writes the poem about Live Y'El,
where he gives colors to different vowels.
And he gets, for example, the color E is white.
Would that be something that you would say synostease actually
do associate the letter E with a color white?
I'd say it's a kind of technological attempt to imitate synostease
here.
OK.
In the 19th century, they were really playing around with color organs
and trying to associate musical sounds with various colors
and experimenting.
And so music started to become driven by colors
and produced them interesting and bizarre results.
And there's still some of that going on around.
But it isn't genuine synostease.
It's what some composer came up with and decided, OK,
this is how I'm going to synthesize senses with my music
and provide the audience with another dimension of music.
So do you believe that the senses, the five senses, the differentiated five
senses, all kind of originated in one super sense?
Yeah, well, now we come back to the idea of the common sense.
The original notion of the common sense was that there is an etymology
of each of the senses in one of them.
And they settled on touch as being the mother of the five.
So hearing, obviously, something comes into your ear and vibrates the drum.
And so you hear it.
But that's a contact to touch.
Taste something touches your tongue, smells something touches your nose and so on.
The eye, this was really interesting because it's coming back.
They imagine the eye not as a receiving set where light rays come in
and are displayed on the retina, but as a broadcasting.
And externation here.
That reached out and touched things.
Your eye would broadcast this sort of hand that reached out and touched and manipulated and fondled things.
So it too was a child of touch.
But things would become a little more complicated.
I'd recommend a little book that came out.
Well, I used it in laws of media, so it came out in the '70s called deciphering the senses.
And it's a good basic primer.
I mean, there are much more sophisticated things now, but this is great school.
Is that by Marshall McLuhan?
No, no, this is by Rifken and Cal.
Okay.
And they said, well, there are as far as we can make out about 17 senses, which is a shocked most people.
In common parlance, normally these days people talk about the basic five plus, three more proprioception,
which tells you where the parts of your body are, so you can walk and keyboard on a typewriter.
Kinesthesia, a sense of movement.
And the visceral sense, the gut sense, which we usually think of as intuition, but apparently it's a sense.
That's eight.
But since then there's a whole range of new ones, or not new ones, just new recognitions of them like no reception, sense of pain,
which apparently is a whole set of sensory receptors all over the skin that tell you when it hurts here.
It's not touch.
It's a separate sense.
What's another one?
Heavens are lots of other senses.
You can have a sense.
If around this happened, you're in a public conveyance like a boss or a street car or a subway car or something.
And you get suddenly the sense that someone is looking at you.
And you try to ignore it, but it gets stronger and stronger.
It's nagging at you, so you whip your head around.
Yeah.
Somebody was looking at you.
You catch them looking away.
Have you had that?
Sure, there would seem to be in the penumbra of your immediate perception, but you can be aware of something without being aware that you are aware of.
Yeah, well, it surfaces at some point.
And most of the other senses are not up to forefront.
Right, they're back a little, but you can become aware of them.
In your book on synesthesia and the soul, what do you mean by the soul in this context?
Is it part of our or is it a matrix of our sensory apparatus or is it separate from it?
Well, I started in looking into the senses, I discovered in medieval writing that they had several different kinds of senses,
There are bodily ones, the five or seven or 17, or actually I think the number now recognized as more like 25 senses.
And there was a sense as common as for each of these groups, there are the bodily senses, the intellectual senses and the spiritual senses,
and the spiritual senses operate through the soul as a medium.
Let me ask this about the senses, so you have a plurality of senses and in any given person and in any given historical age,
some of these senses have more primacy over others.
Can you schematize different ages of history according to which senses take the foreground in one age rather than another?
Yeah, but it's very intimately related to culture.
And so you can't say, well, the middle ages, this sense was in charge, but it would only be in charge in this culture.
It may not be in that one or that one.
And yeah, there is a kind of primacy or an order to the sensory life.
And it's generally the result of the action of our media, our extensions.
And of course, my father wrote quite a lot about that, things like the Gutenberg galaxy and understanding media.
He also has a famous concept of the sensory ratio.
That's the common sense.
The sense is common sense.
Right.
And every age has its particular sensory ratio.
When it comes to changes, it's because the sensory order has moved, has changed.
And you'll detect the changes and you can actually schematize them from the arts.
The arts are sort of early warning system that tells you, here's the new order that's going into place now.
And you may become aware of this in your own life in 20, 30, 40 years.
So Aaron, you mentioned that you collaborated with your father for the last few years.
And that one of the books that came out of that was The Four Laws of Media.
That is co-authored, right?
And maybe we, I'd like to talk about The Four Laws of Media, but I don't know again,
whether we should begin with it or maybe we should end with it.
You can go anyway.
Why don't we start with The Four Laws of Media and then try to reconstruct some of the basic theses of the media theory of Martian would come.
Well, how about if I start by telling you why we did that?
Because we were provoked.
We were provoked into looking into this.
Understanding media came out in '64.
And in about 1971, McGraw Hill, the publisher got in touch and said, hey, you know,
this book has really been selling very well.
Not the things that beginning to flag, but there's a new bunch of people out there.
And a couple of years from now, I'll have 1974.
Why don't we do a tenth anniversary edition?
My father was always up for a challenge.
He said, sure, okay, let's, let's have a go.
Well, the first thing you do, if you're going to do a new edition of the book is look at the critics.
And what did they say?
And critics are wonderful things.
Some authors dislike them and disparage them.
But you know, critics will work for you tirelessly for free.
You can't get a better researcher than a really solid critic.
You'll pick over every nuance, every word, every date, every little detail,
and pounce on any error you've made and pointed out to you.
So this was one thing that we started to take account of.
And that way it was a lot of good.
We correct it a lot of mistakes.
But then there was a whole miscellaneous, grab bag full of other critics,
and you know, howling and squealing.
And what it boiled down to was really a general lament of this is all very well for you, Marshall.
But it ain't scientific.
It wasn't systematic, you know, there were no system at all.
Not at least that they could recognize.
But it was that word scientific that rankled.
So we started asking everybody who dropped into the center.
And that was pretty much everyone in the university or from every faculty in department.
And a lot of outsiders, what does it take to make a scientific statement?
You think in a big place like U of T?
University of Toronto, University of Toronto, when enrollment annually, about 60,000,
which is not big by some places these days, but you know, 40 years ago, it was pretty good.
It took about a year to find somebody who could explain how you make a scientific statement.
We got the answer from Carl Popper, who'd written a book called Objective Knowledge.
And very early, he said a scientific statement is one in which you state your thing so that it can be disproven.
If it's not falsifiable, it's not scientific.
That's right.
It has to be testable.
Well, that was wonderful, a door opened.
And the next day we sat down in the parking lot in some lawn chairs.
It was this time of year, some aren't in nice and warm.
And we asked ourselves, okay, what general statements can we make about all media that anybody can test?
And we opened understanding media because we're looking at doing a new addition.
And right there on the table of contents, we spotted two or three of them.
One is, the last chapter in part one, "Reversal of the overheated medium.
Push anything far enough and it reverses its properties."
Or moves in a complementary direction.
So there was a law.
Great.
A second one was, let me see, "Reversal enhancement any new technology extends, enhances, amplifies some faculty or something."
And we dreamed as well.
That wouldn't balk this.
We got the first three obsolescence in the innovation.
Pushes aside, shoulders aside, something that's already going on.
Like the motor car pushes aside the horse.
And so it's a pretty obvious thing.
So with three in hand, we figured that's a pretty good day's work.
And we packed up and went home for four supper.
Next day we got out the chairs, went sat in the parking lot,
and then we slaved away for around five hours, nothing.
Next day, nothing.
Now we're starting to worry because the sciences all have dozens of laws,
each of them physics, chemistry, astronomy, you name it, biology.
We'd only come up with three.
It took three weeks.
And then we discovered retrieval.
Any innovation brings back in a new form some very old thing that's been offstage for a while.
The very old could mean it's been away for a couple of years or a decade,
or it's been gone for a thousand years.
So, and now we had four.
We kept at it, kept at it.
We were stuck with four.
So we called the set of four at that thread,
because we didn't want to get stuck with Hegel's idea of a triad or and so on.
And that's the basis of the laws of media for laws.
In the introduction of that book, I challenged the reader, I said, "Okay,
I'm just making this a proposition.
There are four, these four.
If you can find one more that applies in every single case, tell us about it.
Now we've got five."
So if you can find one case in which one of them doesn't work, tell us,
and we'll toss out the four immediately.
It's been 30 years now, and nobody's managed to take up the challenge,
prove there is one more or one fewer.
Just so our listeners are clear, the four laws are the law of obsolescence.
New technology drives out something current.
The other is enhancement by which it means that there is,
if you understand media as extensions of the senses,
which is a subtitle of understanding media, then this enhancement refers to that.
I'm presuming, right?
Yeah.
Then they're retrieval, the fourth one that you discovered, and then the reversal.
Yes, okay.
So let me ask you, if I take the law of obsolescence, and I say,
Kindle has to render obsolete the book, or the computer has to render obsolete the printed physical object.
There is not a lot of evidence yet that this new technology is rendering obsolete the previously existing technology,
that they could coexist.
I'm sure there might be other examples in which they coexist for a long time.
Is that a falsification of the law?
No, no, no.
No.
But obsolescence is a really very strange process.
The obsolete thing, people assume, well, if it's obsolete, it's going away.
Generally, the reverse is the case.
One of the signs of obsolescence is a sudden proliferation of the old thing.
It comes back gangbusters.
Yeah, like vinyl records.
Or literacy, literacy technically means working with letters of the alphabet.
But when literacy became obsolete, suddenly there are dozens of new literacies.
There's television literacy, there's photographic literacy, there's media literacy, there's art literacy.
This is like cutting off the hydra's head.
And the moment you do that, a hundred other heads, speak in the sprug from the same neck.
That's obsolescence.
So Eric, can I ask, do you believe that literacy has entered the phase of obsolescence?
That we are no longer in an age of literacy?
Absolutely.
But it seems very counterintuitive given that even though there are computers and Twitter accounts and so forth,
that basically reading is the agency through which all this new technology is operating.
But the effect of the reading isn't the same as the effect of the book.
It instills a very different kind of sensibility.
Right, that for sure.
So if by literacy you mean something that's distinctly tied to the book and the history of the book, then I understand better where you're coming from.
Well, that's the original and basic meaning of literacy nowadays as we mounted its spread.
Literacy now, the original kind, is no longer the basis of culture.
It's counter-cultural.
It's still here.
But it's sort of an obverse of what's going on.
Got it.
So now in understanding media, the theory and other works, I think especially the Gutenberg galaxy.
The strong thesis there is that there was a very long historical period of literacy.
And that literacy did everything to shape perception and structure or consciousness and emotions and so forth.
And if I understand it correctly, where literacy starts fading is with the rise of electronic media.
Yeah, is that correct?
And by electronic media, Marshall McLuhan meant primarily things like television, radio.
Oh, you start with the telegraph.
And the telegraph.
And radio, telephone.
Just work your way up each one's a new phase, a new plateau in the escalation of electronic media.
So I'm trying to understand how we go from what senses were most in the forefront during the age of literacy and what were replacing them in the electronic age.
Let's think about the whole manuscript period, which was literate.
But only a small fraction of people were literate.
Most people weren't literate because they had no use for it.
In 10, 12, or 8, or so on century, if you're a farmer, knowing how to read and write was no use at all.
So you didn't have to bother.
But some people did cultivate literacy.
There were people with a lot of spare time.
They were generally in monasteries or teachers.
And they taught the classics.
And from the classics, they learned techniques of literary criticism.
And the practice was you learned how to read and how to criticize how to interpret texts by studying the poets.
And then when you came to your serious business, if you're among the scriptures,
have learned the techniques, then you brought them over to work in the scriptures.
And the two were always in parallel.
There's a kind of rumor abroad that they discouraged looking at the classics as profane.
profane, meaning just non-Christian, non-religious literature.
But no, they used that as sort of kindergarten, where you learn the basic techniques of writing, of addressing an audience, of assessing how you obtain effect.
I mentioned before the intellectual senses.
And the levels of interpretation in literature and in Scripture are actually, they were called the senses.
And it's a happy fault, if you will, because they are senses.
I'll read the loop-back, wrote magnificent four-volume treatise on interpretation of Scripture in the Middle Ages.
And he called it exegest medieval, medieval exegesis, "Le cácrosants de liqueur," the four senses of Scripture.
Now, we have the bodily senses, but the intellectual senses are exactly that, four levels of awareness.
And there are extensions of the mind, and you used them to probe the text and learn from it.
And there are two kinds.
There's the kind you use in profane literature or in everyday stuff.
And the kind you bring to bear on the Scriptures, the Old Testament, the New Testament.
By senses, they're also the cácrosants.
The four meanings, you can also say meanings, right?
Yeah, that's right.
And both meanings of that were the senses are applicable.
They are actually senses.
So, if the vast majority of the people in the age of literacy were not literate, does that mean that the age of literacy was what recorded history has given us a record of?
Or is it that?
It was there in sort of embryo, and with Gutenberg, it exploded into it.
The one star supernovated into a whole galaxy.
The Gutenberg galaxy.
What did Marshall think about the electronic age?
So, did television create a new consolidation of the public?
Because in the early days, you had three major networks, and you could count on everyone, almost everyone who had a television to watch the Ed Sullivan show or the evening news,
and you created a really coherent, organic public through this new medium that was television, right?
Yeah, you started with a new thing that nobody had ever heard of before called the Mass Audience.
You never had a Mass Audience with print, but you started to get one with radio, and you definitely got one with TV,
and I was intensified with color TV in the '60s.
And the Mass Audience is a group of people who inhabit cyberspace.
A Mass Audience can consist of two or three million people, or two or three hundred thousand, or a couple of thousand, or a few hundred, or five.
Size does not determine the Mass Audience.
What determines the Mass is simultaneity. With print, everybody got their book and read them at different times.
With radio, everybody's there simultaneously. They're all participating simultaneously.
So, you have, let's say, a kind of character, participation occurring through a large number of people spread all over the globe, just as with this podcast.
Although people listen to it, not simultaneously, but at their own timing, yeah.
But they're spread all over. They're spread all over.
They're not in one place at the same time. But on broadcast media, yeah.
Now, the other thing that characterizes this group, the Mass, is, as I said, numbers are not a...
You can't quantify Mass. It's just massive period.
But they are also simultaneously present here in the studio with you.
And you are simultaneously present in every one of their locations.
Only you're there and they're here. Minus the physical body.
They've set the body and its frailties aside, and they are now transported.
You're not sending messages. This is in transportation because it's simultaneous.
What we say here is simultaneously present there and there and there and there.
Well, is that different from the presence of an audience in body?
Yes. There's an amazingly interesting study of crowds by Elias Canetti, called Crowds and Power.
And he said there are basically two kinds of physical crowds.
You see, now, the Mass audience isn't a physical thing. It's a metaphysical thing.
We've moved into another dimension of being.
But physical audiences, there are what he called closed crowds and open crowds.
The closed crowd, he said, has one primary characteristic it wants to grow.
It wants to add people to get bigger and bigger and bigger.
And the narrative stops growing. It starts to collapse.
The closed crowd sets aside growth in favor of permanence.
So the closed crowd is characterized by, well, an excellent example is a group of people in a closed room and a closed door.
They're there. They disperse, but then they reassemble.
They're not interested in growing. They want permanence. They're two very different things.
But these are the only two kinds of crowd.
So I'm assuming that when you speak about closed crowds or you're speaking about mass audience,
you are not referring to tribal societies.
The mass audiences are a very tribal thing.
Yeah. So Marshall McLuhan speaks a lot about a kind of resurgence of tribalism in the new media of his age.
Is it because it creates new forms of togetherness in simultaneity?
Yes.
And is that what it means to be tribal and that the media is this also another example of how a new media can retrieve or allow for the return of previous sensibilities?
The one of the distinguished characteristics here is involvement.
What characterized are civilized or literary sense of self was individualism and detachment.
You're only individual because you had detached from everyone else, but tribal groups rely on intense involvement in each other and in the group.
And if you're in a tribal group and you withdrawn become an individual, that is if you start to have private aims, private ambitions, private dreams, private thoughts, not related to the consensus or the group, then you become a threat to the integrity of the group.
And they will usually either throw you out or kill you.
In Eskimo society used to be the case. I was told by Ted Carpenter.
But the guy who exhibited these tendencies was usually parked on a nice low and they waved goodbye.
Because any threat to the group, anything can cause that group to fracture, to fragment and dissolve.
But fragmentation and separation characterize individualism.
And they are definitely products, byproducts of the alphabet and of print.
So your father talked about, famously talked about hot and cold media.
And you talked now about involvement being the critical concept here.
Cool media are very high involvement and hot media are very high detachment.
Right. So I think most readers of understanding media get that.
I think that it's very explicitly stated that hot media are much less conducive to involvement or dialogue.
Whereas cool media permit more.
I think where many readers of that book get confused is in the examples.
So maybe we can go through some of them and maybe you can clarify why radio for example is hot and television is cold.
It seems radio is hotter than TV.
But it's a lot cooler than print.
Because print is very hot.
Because print does not allow of interaction.
No, it has to do with how the senses are affected by the medium.
Not by the content. Not by the radio program.
Or the essay in the book. Or the novel.
But by the actual technology and how it works on the senses communities.
What it does there.
In laws of media the very first chapter we spend a lot of time showing precisely how the alphabet is different from all the other writing systems.
The closest things are syllabaries.
But syllabaries work with more themes.
That is each character represents a whole sound to consonant and a vowel.
The alphabet they are all fragmented.
The more themes are each of them carry meaning.
The alphabet the letters meaning was.
So there is another layer of abstraction.
And if you carry this and a dozen other features of the alphabet over into your mental life,
then you develop a sense of detachment from other people.
Private, a sensibility.
And that's very very hot.
So you have to detach it from the so called message content in the sense that some of the most intense correspondence that I've received has been in reactions.
That's responses to books I've written.
So although these are individual readers kind of isolated reading on their own in non communal context,
there is another form of communion between reader and author or a community of readers,
which is one of the pleasures if you're an academic.
So much of our time is spent alone either reading or writing the dissertation or writing the essay or writing the book.
And when you discover on those occasions where you go to symposia or other things that there's actually a number of us doing the same thing,
then it's a reminder that there are forms of dialogue that are possible within the solitary activity of reading and writing.
Oh yeah.
What reading in the Middle Ages before print was quite a different thing.
For one thing, it was reading aloud exclusively and reading aloud meant performance.
So why would television be cool?
Cooler.
Because television brings to the fore other senses to the nose you want to have available for reading.
There's a little war of the senses going on.
This is why I love Finnegan's wake by James Joyce because he wrote about this almost exclusively in that book.
He dramatized it.
He had a chapter on the Royal Divorce of the senses and another one later on about a Royal Wedding,
where the senses come back together with radio and film, sound film.
Can we go back to this question of the medium as the message?
That constant mantra, you've probably been asked a thousand times to make sure that we all understand exactly what is meant by the most famous phrase associated with other words.
What are the biggest work?
Yeah.
Well most people make the mistake of trying to take it literally.
It's a paradox.
The message is generally a term for the content.
What's it about?
What's the message?
I said, "Well, it's the medium as the message, but most people aren't able to deal with paradox.
They don't imagine anybody, especially in academic, with throw paradox at them.
That's not responsible."
But the medium you have to think of what a medium consists of.
And my father is very explicit in the book Understanding Media right on the front and the first page.
He says, "A medium is an environment of services and disservices that come along with a new technology in the same way that for the motor car as the technology, the medium for the car is the road.
The content of any technology is always an earlier form."
So the content of the book was the manuscript and the content of manuscript was speech.
And the content of television is film and newspapers.
And so on.
The content of any new form is always the only, in the case of the computer, at first, the content of the computer was the filing cabinet.
And the accounting department.
So the content is another layer of consideration.
Almost everything that goes by the term or people understand by the idea of media study these days has to do with the computer.
Has to do with content and what the thing is used for.
But you asked about the medium as the message, the medium meaning the environment, and all the social and mental adjustments that you make to accommodate the new form, that's the message.
It changes you and how you think, how you imagine, what your tastes are, where you live, how you live.
With the motor car, cities came apart and developed suburbs. People stopped living within walking distance of where they worked.
It changed society, it changed the organization of groups.
That's the message of the car.
So if you take the history of media in the very broad sense now with Marshall McLuhan's theory, I'm saying Marshall McLuhan, because we have
two wins in the room, I want to get Andrew involved in the moment. But this will be my last question of clarification.
And then the general understanding is that there's a broad division between the oral societies pre-literate, where orality is dominant.
And then you have this long period in Western history of the literate age, which includes antiquity by the middle ages up, and then explosion with the Gutenberg revolution and so forth.
And then an electronic age.
Inclusion.
Okay, do you believe that we are now in a fourth major stage beyond the electronic age, or is the digital age a kind of natural evolution or exasperation of the electronic age?
It's a completely new flavor of electronic media.
The fact is any new medium rearranges the senses.
And since the invention of the telegraph they've been going in pretty much in one direction, and that is away from what we'd had for a few centuries with print, away from the fish and breaking apart of the sensory and fissioning off of the visual suppression relative of all the other senses.
Now they just shoved vision back in among the others.
And so all of the electronic forms, including digital, are multisensory in one or another balance, but they're all multisensory.
And that's bad news for civilization, because it's based on the individual and on separation and individual and objectivity and detachment.
But it also means we're undergoing a reacquaintance with who we used to be, likely a very different fire.
There's something interesting here too.
Normally it takes a couple of centuries to get used to a new technology.
The time gap between innovations I was getting shorter and shorter and shorter, we don't have enough time to accommodate or adjust to the effects of one before the next one's hitting us.
Yeah, well I've worked on this myself in terms of the increasing acceleration in these major revolutions where I can tell the difference between students who were born with the smartphone and those prior because they were thinking in a completely different way.
It's not at completely different species, but very, very noticeable in those who had personal computers when growing up as supposed to people like my generation who did not.
And so there's no doubt that the increasing overturning of the basic conditions through the new technologies and media that are being introduced at such a accelerator pace is creating conditions of radical disorientation.
But since we're speaking about this, can I just shift a little bit to the topic of generations because I think it's quite remarkable that we have here you and your son in the studio talking about work of your father which is extending itself into the contemporary world in terms of its relevance and pertinence.
I want to welcome to the show by the way, I think to it formally at the beginning, but maybe you can tell our listeners a little bit about the sense of a legacy that you've inherited.
And I know that unlike your father who has followed very closely in the footsteps of Marshall McLuhan by working on media and also being a joy scholar and a literary historian, you actually have taken a different career path, right?
Yeah, I'm sort of an accidental McLuhan.
So is he, but he jumped into it with both feet whereas I'm reluctant and by no means an academic, I'm not a scholar of any kind.
My interests were elsewhere, they were in music and poetry in self-directed learning.
So what is your profession?
I run a small business doing furniture or pull-street.
How I get into the McLuhan stuff is through a few different channels. Some years ago, my father inherited my grandfather's library.
And my grandfather's library wasn't just a collection of books, but it was an annotated library.
And so his books become repositories of things he found interesting.
In sites he gleaned, there was never a formal inventory done of the contents of this library.
So in order for it to go somewhere, we had to be able to tell people what it was, what it contained.
So I took on the task in the winter of 2009-10.
I ended up spending about a year and a half on this inventory, which I documented on a blog called Inscriptorium.
So Inscriptorium.we're press.com.
I've kept it up ever since and in my spare time, I do some reading and try to understand.
And part of my mission is to attempt to help people today who aren't equipped with the academic background to try and understand these very complex concepts.
So I run a second blog now on medium.com, which I find kind of meta about media.
And it's my name Andrew McLuhan on medium if you want to look at it.
Well, I think Marshall is really lucky to have both of you and your father carrying on that legacy.
And it's really, I'm sure he's grateful to you wherever he is.
And I'm certainly grateful for both of you coming on to the show.
Well, thank you both for coming on.
I remind our listeners, we've been speaking with Eric McLuhan, the son of Marshall McLuhan and Andrew McLuhan.
And Marshall's ghost has been quite present here over the last hour.
So thanks again.
Thank you, Robert.
Bye bye.
Thank you.
Bye bye.
[MUSIC]
You just heard from my car when you know what I'm telling you.
None of my smile with girls, speed after I.
You tell me it's alright.
You don't mind a little pain.
You say you just want me to take you for a time.
[MUSIC]