Dear Friends – here is another collection of McLuhan articles sent to me by Malcolm Dean – hope you find these collections useful – please let me know if this is useful as I anticipate Malcolm will be sending me more – Bob
http://www.jstor.org/stable/30183384
The Clearing House 42(7):447-448, March 1968
Instructional Media: Is Book Dead?
Marshall McLuhan
http://www.jstor.org/stable/30193120
The Clearing House 30(9):524, May 1956
Educational Effects of the Mass Media
Marshall McLuhan
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2114396
The Journal of Economic History 20(4):566-575, December 1960
Effects of the Improvements of Communication Media
Marshall McLuhan
http://www.jstor.org/stable/354088
College Composition and Communication 9(1):16-20, February 1958
Speed of Cultural Change1
Marshall McLuhan
«It has taken us 100 years from then to realize that the meaning of the electronic revolution is a «Do-it-yourself movement.» We have been so fascinated by the mechanical and the mechanistic and the automatic that we have overlooked the obvious meaning which has been known to the poets and painters for a century. The electronic revolution means «do it yourself»–«you are the poet.» Mr. Eliot constantly annoys people who ask him, «Did you, when you wrote this line in Sweeney,» or some other poem, «did you mean so and so?» And Mr. Eliot always says, «Well, I must have, if that’s what you got.» This seems utterly baffling and unreasonable to the ordinary inquirer, but it is part of this basic attitude of «Do it yourself, you are the poet, too.»»
«Last year T. S. Eliot spoke in this city on The Limits of Criticism to an audience of 13,273 people in the Sports Stadium. Criticism may have its limits, but culture does not!»
[1] A slightly revised tape recording of a talk presented at the luncheon of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Hotel Leamington, Minneapolis, November 29, 1957, during the convention of the National Council of Teachers of English.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/468929
New Literary History 10(3):557-580, Anniversary Issue: I (Spring, 1979)
Pound, Eliot, and the Rhetoric of The Waste Land
Marshall McLuhan
http://www.jstor.org/stable/468336
New Literary History 2(3):517-531, Performances in Drama, the Arts, and Society (Spring, 1971)
Roles, Masks, and Performances
Marshall McLuhan
«At a panel discussion on «Theatre and the Visual Arts» with W. H. Auden and Buckminster Fuller, I ventured to ask what effect, if any, Apollo 14 might have on the theatre of the present and the future. Auden proclaimed: «I am a nineteenth century man and proud of it!»
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566945
Perspecta 11:161-167, 1967
The Invisible Environment: The Future of an Erosion
Marshall McLuhan
«I have started then with the theme of the imperceptibility of new environments, and that what is perceptible in typical human situations is the old environment.»
«The artist as a maker of anti-environments becomes the enemy in society. He doesn’t seem to be very well adjusted. He does not accept the environment with all its brainwashing functions with any passivity whatever; he just turns upon it and reflects his anti-environmental perceptions upon it. The artist, for the past century, has increasingly fused or merged with the criminal in popular estimation, as he has become anti-environment.»
«Our newspapers create an information environment, yet without crime as content we would not be able to perceive the environment. The newspapers have to have bad news, otherwise there would not be any newspapers, but only ads, or good news. Without bad news we could not discern the ground-rules of the environment. This does not necessarily mean the environment is bad, but it means its operation upon us is total and ruthless. The environment is always the brainwasher, so that the well-adjusted person, by definition, has been brainwashed. He is adjusted. He’s had it. There is a book by Erwin Strauss recently which throws new light on Pavlov’s operations (the Russian psychologist). He didn’t get his conditioning effects by means of stimuli or signals to his experimental subjects. Rather he did it by environmental controls. He put his subjects in environments in which there was no sound, in which the heat and other sensory controls were very carefully adjusted and maintained steadily. Pavlov discovered that if you tried to condition animals in an ordinary environment, it did not work. The environment is the real conditioner, not the stimulus or the content. So the Pavlov story needs to be turned around in order to be observed; but the role of crime as a way of perceiving society is a mysterious one. I am not going to make any moral observations on it whatever. It has increasingly pushed the artist and the scientist into the role of being an enemy.»
«Xerography is bringing a reign of terror into the world of publishing because it means that every reader can become both author and publisher. It decentralizes the long-centralized publishing process. Authorship and readership alike can become production-oriented under xerography. Anybody can take any book apart, insert parts of other books and other materials of his own interest, and make his own book in a relatively fast time. Any teacher can take any ten textbooks on any subject and custom-make a different one by simply xeroxing a chapter from this one and a chapter from that one. The problem is copyrighting, and Congress is now pondering these problems-how to protect the old technology from the new technology by legislation. They will not succeed. There is no possible protection from technology except by technology. When you create a new environment with one phase of a technology, you have to create an anti-environment with the next. But xerography is electricity invading the world of typography and it means a total revolution in this old sphere, or this old technology, a revolution which is being felt in the classroom itself.»
«I invite you to consider that perhaps the best way of estimating the impact of any new environmental technology is to notice what happens to the older technologies. You can never perceive the impact of any new technology directly; but it can be done in the manner of Perseus looking at the Gorgon in the mirror of art. You have to perceive the consequences of the new environment on the old environment before you know what the new environment is. You cannot tell what it is until you have seen it do things to the old one. The need, however, to understand the processes and changes brought about by the new technology gets stronger as the technology does.»
«We are engaged in Toronto in carrying out a unique experiment–it is far too big for us–we need a lot of help and a lot of collaboration. We are carrying out an experiment to establish what are the sensory thresholds of the entire population of Toronto. That is, we are attempting to measure, quantitatively, the levels at which the entire population prefers to set its visual, auditory, tactile, visceral, and other senses as a matter of daily use and preference–how much light, how much heat, how much sound, how much movement–as a threshold level. Anything that alters a sensory threshold alters the outlook and experience of a whole society. The sensory thresholds change without warning or indications to the users thereof, for it is new technological environments that shift these levels. We are concerned with what shifts occur in a sensory threshold when some new form comes in. What happens to our sensory lives with the advent of television, the motor car, or radio? If we can establish this sort of knowledge quantitatively, we will have something which the computer can really bite into. A child is a genius till he is five because all his senses are in active interrelation. Then his senses specialize. The computer will be in a position to carry out orchestrated programming for the sensory life of entire populations. It can be programmed in terms of their total needs, not just in terms of the messages they should be hearing, but in terms of the total experience as picked up and patterned by all the senses at once. For example, if you were to write an ideal sensory program for Indonesia or some area of the world in which you wanted to leap-frog across a lot of old technology, this would be possible if you knew in the first place its present sensory thresholds and, second, if you had established what kind of sensory effect a given technology like radio or literacy had upon sensory life as a whole.
On this continent the sensory levels have changed drastically since television. The visual component in our lives has been dropped dramatically and the visceral, the kinetic, the auditory modes of response have shot up to compensate for the drop in the visual component of our culture. This sensory shift has changed the taste in design, in packaging, in every form of entertainment, as well as in every form of vehicle, food, and in clothing.
The «Beatles» stare at us with eloquent messages of changed sensory modes for our whole population, and yet people merely think how whimsical, how bizarre, how grotesque. The Beatles are trying to tell us by the anti-environment they present just how we have changed and in what ways.»
«I think we are rapidly moving toward a time when we might say, with full awareness of cause and effects: «In our present sensory condition I don’t think we could properly accommodate 200 more lines on T.V.» Colored T.V. will considerably change the whole sensory life of the public. It is a much more tactile form than black and white. For the latter is seen only with the periphery of the eye. But what would happen to the North American world if we did as the French and Germans have done; if instead of 450 lines on our television, we were to put 800? The results might be most gratifying to the educational establishment. If we raised the visual intensity or the visual component of the T.V. image, it might serve enormously to ease the transition from the old mechanical age to the electronic age. What would be the chances of getting an experimental study of such a change in our time? I don’t know. Lindegren would say the chances were not good. Anything that is serious is out of bounds. I think it was David Riesman who said no social scientist would ever study anything important.»
«Suppose we were to brief 50,000,000 people on some extremely difficult problems facing top-level scientists. Inevitably, some dozens, hundreds, of the 50,000,000 audience would see instantly through any type of opaque problem, even on the highest scientific levels. Robert Oppenheimer is fond of saying that «there are children playing here in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.» There are enormous possibilities for using an audience as work force in scientific research, or any other type of research. It is simply that we insist on beaming instruction at them instead of allowing them to participate in the action of discovery.
For example, when printing was new, it created what was known as the Public. In the 16th Century and after. Montaigne’s phrase «le publique,» came into use. The 16th Century created the public as a new environment. This completely altered politics and altered all social arrangements in education, in work, and in every other area. Electric circuitry did not create the public; it created the mass, meaning an environment of information that involved everybody in everybody. Now, to a man brought up in the environment of the public, the mass audience is a horror–it is a mess. In the same way, the public was a many-headed monster to a feudal aristocrat. He never bothered to study its structure any more than we study the mass. Circuitry brings people into relation with each other in total involvement which creates the possibility of dialogue and discovery on an enormous scale. The structure of the public had less of such possibility. The public consisted of fragmented separate individuals with separate points of view. The public was an additive structure. The mass audience is a quite different structure, enormously richer-enormously more capable of integrated creative activity than the old public was. All the old public could do was to enunciate private points of view which they clashed into each other furiously.»
«Let me suggest that it may be possible to write programs for changes, not only in consciousness but in the unconscious in the future. One could write a kind of science fiction story of the future of consciousness, the future of the unconscious, «the future of an erosion.» The future of consciousness is already assuming a very different pattern, a very different character.»
«It will be possible in this generation, I hope, to program the environment in such a way that we can learn a second language as we learned our mother tongue, rapidly and totally, as a means of perception and of discovery. The future of language presents the possibility of a world without words, a wordless, intuitive world, like a technological expression of the action of consciousness. E.S.P.»
http://www.jstor.org/stable/27538333
The Sewanee Review 62(1):38-55, January-March 1954
Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press
Marshall McLuhan
«In her fascinating book Newton Demands the Muse, Marjorie Nicolson records the impact of Newtonian optics on the themes of the poets. But the techniques of rendering experience were equally modified in the direction of an inclusive image of society and consciousness. The new vision of space and light as outer phenomena which were precisely correlative to our inner faculties, gave a new meaning and impetus to the juxtaposition of images and experiences.»
«How deeply English artists had understood the principles of picturesque art by 1780 appears from the invention of cinema at that time. In 1781 De Loutherbourg, the theatrical scene painter, contrived in London a panorama which he called the «Eidophusikon» so as «to realize pictures in all four dimensions.» His «Various Imitations of Natural Phenomena, Represented by Moving Pictures» were advertised in these words and caused a sensation. Gainsborough, we are told by a contemporary, «was so delighted that for a time he thought of nothing else, talked of nothing else, and passed his evenings at the exhibition in long succession.» He even made one of these machines for himself capable of showing sunrise and moonrise as well as storms and ships at sea. Gainsborough through this cinema was experiencing the novelty of cubism with «lo spettatore nel centro del quadro.»» [ the viewer in the center of the picture ]
http://www.jstor.org/stable/30216955
Audio Visual Communication Review 8(5):74-83, 1960
Electronics and the Changing Role of Print
Marshall McLuhan
«Let us suppose for a moment that a team of present-day testers had been available in the year 1500 to find out whether the new book or reading machines and instructional materials were capable of doing the plenary traditional job of education in the future. Would not this team, even as it would today, ask whether the privately read word could measure up as a means of teaching and learning to the memorized manuscript and its formidable extension in oral exegesis and group disputation? Since we know that printing wiped out the educational procedures of the preceding centuries, we can say that the testers would have been quite wrong in asking whether the new could compete with the old when the new had only one mode of procedure, namely, to erase and to brainwash the older culture. Our testers today are still geared to the static assumptions of the print form and ignore the structural dynamics of the electronic form. In 1500, as in 1960, they could report variations in the facility with which educational skills in a wide range of subjects are achieved by print or by ETV. But they have no regard for the new patterns of perception and sensibility which are subliminally imposed on us all by new structures for codifying and moving information. For the new structures modify our means of apprehending past and present. They re-create our sense of space and time, of teaching and learning. Basically, I should say that in the electronic situation there is great new stress on learning (creativity) and a corresponding relaxation of teaching stress.»
«The major part of Dr. McLuhan’s presentation to the seminar was a discussion of the diagrams on page 83. Dr. McLuhan said that basically they suggest that the structural impact (SI) of any media is usually antithetic or complementary to subjective completion (SC).
TESTABLE HYPOTHESES
1. That SI is incomplete, insofar as the human senses are concerned, in all media except speech.
2. That SC tends to occur for those senses omitted in SI.
3. That LD of sense image in SI results in corresponding intensity of SC for that particular image. (For instance, LD, in causing much effort of completion in telephone and TV, greatly weakens the visual fill-in for telephone and the tactual-kinesthetic fill-in for TV.)
4. That HD of program materials in an LD medium makes a frustrating experience for the perceiver.
5. That the SI of a new medium alters both the SI and SC of the old media.
6. That a medium within a medium creates a fantasy situation, for instance, in writing and printing where speech is held within visual codes. Is this because the perceiver can remain uncommitted on the frontier between two modes?
7. That a new medium (like film) tends to break up older media SI, for example, to break speech out of the printed visual code. (New Castle experiment)
8. That the SR (stimulus response) delay between SI and SC is a «moment» of «play» and «translation» and teachability.
9. That this moment between media and between modes naturally becomes a dominant experience in multi-media culture.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3102368
Technology and Culture 16(1):74-78, January 1975
McLuhan’s Laws of the Media
Marshall McLuhan
«Since electric speeds of information constitute a sort of simultaneous structuring of experience, synchrony, representing all directions at once, is, as it were, acoustic; whereas the diachronic, representing one stage at a time, is visual in its analytical pattern. Few people seem to be aware that visual space and order are continuous, connected, homogeneous, and static. In these regards, visual space is quite different from any other kind of space, be it tactile, kinetic, audile, or osmic (smell). Visual space alone can be divided.
You will note that, although these are called Laws of the Media, only a few of them deal with communications media narrowly conceived. Instead, I am talking about «media» in terms of a larger entity of information and perception which forms our thoughts, structures our experience, and determines our views of the world about us. It is this kind of information flow–media–which is responsible for my postulation of a series of insights regarding the impact of certain technological developments. I call them «laws» because they represent, as do scientific «laws,» an ordering of thought and experience which has not yet been disproved; I call them «laws of the media» because the channels and impact of today’s electronic communication systems provide the informational foundation upon which we order, or structure, these experiential perceptions.»
«The Laws of the Media have been shaped by studying the effects of media, so there is always a hidden ground upon which these effects stand, and against which they bounce. That is, the law of a medium is a figure interplaying with a ground. As with a wheel and an axle, there must be an interval between the two in order for the play to exist.»
______________________
Robert K. Logan
Chief Scientist – sLab at OCAD
Prof. Emeritus – Physics – U. of Toronto
www.physics.utoronto.ca/Members/logan
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