2. I will continue with my presentation of media and what McLuhan has to say about
them. I hope you remember the last session so I will not repeat so much. But just
as a short recall: Why do I talk to you about all these “old” , in your eyes maybe
“unmodern” media? Because our perceptions about media, their use and
influence on our daily life is mostly unconscious. And the best way to find some
distance to our own conceptions, perceptions and convictions is to look at things
in an unfamiliar way – for example with the help of a theory or new experiences.
So I do this because my hope is to open your eyes for some deep-rooted
characteristics, , influences and the evolution of media.
Most of the following media will be electronic media. What do you think are
electronic Media?
For example the telegraph. In1844 Samuel Morse opened the first telegraph line
from Washington to Baltimore with $30.000 obtained from Congress
McLuhan calls the telegraph “the social hormone” as a metaphor to describe its
impact
2
3. Like all the other media, the telegraph wasn’t even invented “at once”, but had a long history. The transport of signals over great distances started for example with
fumata (Rauchzeichen) and the telegraph also had root in acoustic signals or Braille. Nevertheless, the Morse telegraph was a real revolution because it was the first
electronic medium.
I can use the case of the telegraph to explain some functions ALL electronic media have according McLuhan. The first is:
***
they offer an experience of “instant speed of information.” So what the people today call “Real-time-experience” and think of it as a new and typical achievement of
the Internet, it is in fact much older. For McLuhan the “electric implosion” started right at the time, when radio, telegraph and telephone came into play.
***
He tells the story of the famous Crippen-Case to illustrate that point:
In 1910, Dr. Hawley H. Crippen, a U.S. physician who had been practicing in London, murdered his wife, buried her in the cellar of their home, and fled the country
with his secretary aboard a liner (ship) called Montrose. The secretary was dressed as a boy, and the pair traveled as Mr. Robinson and son. Captain George Kendall of
the Montrose became suspicious of the Robinsons, having read in the English papers about the Crippen case.
The Montrose was one of the few ships then equipped with wireless telegraph. Binding his wireless operator to secrecy, Captain Kendall sent a message to Scotland
Yard, and the Yard sent Inspector Dews on a faster liner to race the Montrose across the Atlantic. Dews, dressed as a pilot, boarded the Montrose before it reached
port, and arrested Crippen.
***
The Crippen case shows a characteristic that is inherent to all electronic media according McLuhan.
The instantspeed of information leads to a collapse of delegated authority and dissolution of management structures made familiar in the organization charts
****
The separation of function and division of stages, spaces and tasks tend to dissolve
This influence on traditional organizational structures and societal hierarchies was not so clear at first. In the beginning it had an opposite, strengthening effect on
existing hierarchies. McLuhan cites the
former German Armaments minister Albert Speer (who), in a speech at the Nuremberg trials, (has) made some bitter remarks about the effects of social media on
German life: “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…”
3
4. Some further, typical characteristics of electronic media:
****
They have a tendency to create a kind of organic interdependence among all the
institutions of society.
****
For example when McLuhan called the telegraph a hormone he meant exactly that
because Hormone is a specific chemical messenger-substance, made by an
endocrine gland and secreted into the blood, to regulate and coordinate the
functions of distant organs.
***
EM is a means of getting in touch with every facet of being at once, like the brain
itself
***
Therefore,
Electricity is only incidentally visual and auditory: it is primarily tactile.
4
5. In the early days of the internet a lot of people thought that it was only good for to
spread fun, sex and crime or are still convinced of that. It was almost impossible to
oversee the changes it will bring. A lot of people were also convinced that the
internet would never become serious enough to be of economic or political use.
The same was true with the telegraph at first. McLuhan says:
The print culture man had great difficulties to notice any facts about the form of
the new medium.
An Editor of the New York Herald Tribune commented on 1861:
“It was a toy and they just had to use it. CBS combed Europe for hot news and came
up with a sausage-eating contest, which was duly sent back via the miracle ball,
although that particular new event could have gone by camelback without loosing
any of its essence.” (John Crosby, New York Herald Tribune 1861)
***
Also, the impact of a new media often remains unseen because in the beginning
they are normally used to improve old media. A long time the telegraph was
mainly used to assist two existing media, the railway and the newspaper:
During its early growth, the telegraph was subordinate to railway and newspaper,
those immediate extensions of industrial production and marketing. In fact, once
the railways began to stretch across the continent, they relied very much on the
telegraph for their coordination, so that the image of the stationmaster and the
telegraph operator were easily superimposed in the American mind.
5
6. Often, the consequences of a new media are at first reflected in arts.
The Bauhaus school for example (1919) became one of the great centers of effort
tending toward an inclusive human awareness, …and a lot of other new artforms
made the 20th century one of the most fruitful for art
…but the same task was accepted by a race of giants that sprang up in music and
poetry, architecture, and painting. They gave the arts of this century an ascendancy
over those of other ages comparable to that which we have long recognized as true
of modern science.
6
7. All electric media create fun at first but most of them created some kind of more
or less unconscious anxieties. McLuhan thinks that it was no accident that in 1844,
at the same time when the people for example used the telegraph to play chess or
to do lotteries, the philosopher Sǿren Kierkegaard published a book called “The
Concept of Dread” which some people see together with the Work of Friedrich
Nietzsche as the starting point for postmodernism. What did McLuhan meant by
saying “The age of anxiety has begun”?
McLuhan was surely not that kind of prophet who saw modern media as a doom.
He tried to look on it neutrally I think what he meant was that this anxiety is the
first psychological state of people who underwent a big change or shock. It must
have been strange to be suddenly informed about what happened to everybody in
the whole world. And, actually, the 20th century with all its electrical achievements
became a century of big achievements but also of horrible events, just to mention
world war I and II, cold world war an so on. Of course, we got “used” to it. This
anxiety seems to be often more or less unconscious. We simply don’t know what
catastrophes like 9/11, Catrina, Haiti and so on do with our souls although we stay
very cool on the surface.
7
8. Telegraph was the first medium that created the weather forecast, perhaps the
most popular participative of all the “Human interest” in the daily press. In early
days of telegraph, rain created problems in the grounding of wires. These problems
drew attention to weather dynamics
=> The weather is still the most popular advertisement space
8
9. With the telephone, there occurs the extension of ear and voice that is a kind of
extra sensory perception
Originally, Melville Bell, who invented the telephone did not intended to do so.
Instead,
The invention of the telephone was an incident in the larger effort of the past
century to render speech visible. Melville Bell, the father of Alexander Graham Bell,
spent his life devising a universal alphabet that he published 1867 under the title
Visible Speech. Besides the aim to make all languages of the world immediately
present to each other in a simple form, the Bells, father and son, were much
concerned to improve the state of the deaf. Visible speech seemed to promise
immediate means of release for the deaf from their prison. It led them to study of
the new electrical devices that yielded the telephone.
9
10. Incidents like this are often not “pure chance” but show an
inner connection between seemingly very different media:
The Braille system of dots-for-letters had begun as a means of reading military
messages in darkness, then was transferred to music, and finally to reading for the
blind. Letters had been codified as dots for the fingers long before the Morse Code
was developed for telegraph use.
10
11. One of the first sentences which were transferred: “Das Pferd isst keinen
Gurkensalat” (“the horse doesn’t eat cucumber salad”)
The telephone created whole new industries and made old ones much more
productive. It was especially important for a flourishing, international business.
And it created a prominent new job: the phone operator.
11
12. The design of mouthpiece an earphone according to McLuhan tells a lot about the
culture:
****
The “French phone”, the union of mouthpiece and earphone in a single instrument,
is a significant indication of the french liason of the senses that English-speaking
people keep firmly separate. French is “the language of love” just because it unites
voice and ear in an especially close way, as does the telephone. So it is quite natural
to kiss the telephone, but not easy to visualize while phoning.
12
13. Why can we not visualize while telephoning? At once, the reader will protest, “But I
do visualize on the telephone!” When you try the experiment deliberately, you will
find that we simply can’t visualize while phoning, though all literate people try to
do so and, therefore, believe they are succeeding.
What do we do instead? Some people feel a strong urge to “doodle” while phoning.
13
14. McLuhan says “we have no body while we phone. The reason for this is that talking to the telephone and
visualizing/acting requires different areas of the brain
He uses the following case to show this. Of course this is the special case of a psychotic, but it is stunning
anyway:
On September 6, 1949, a psychotic veteran, Howard B. Unruh, in a mad rampage on the streets of Camden,
New Jersey, killed thirteen people, and then returned home. Emergency crews, bringing up machine guns,
shotguns, and tear gas bombs, opened fire. At this point an editor on the Camden Evening Courier looked up
Unruh’s name in the telephone directory and called him. Unruh stopped firing and answered, “Hello?”
“This is Howard?”
“Yes”
“Why are you killing people?”
“I don’t know. I can’t answer that yet. I’ll have to talk to you later. I’m too busy now.”
***
The very nature of the telephone, as all electric media, is to compress and unify that which had previously
been divided and specialized. Only the “authority of knowledge” works by telephone because of the speed that
creates a total and inclusive field of relations.
Speed requires that the decisions made be inclusive, not fragmentary or partial so that literate people typically
resist the telephone
***
The telephone demands complete participation, unlike the written and printed page. Any literate man resents
such a heavy demand for his total attention because he has long been accustomed to fragmentary attention
***
Oral people like the telephone because it gives them the feeling of more complete communication
It is interesting that neurotic children lose all their neurotic syndromes when phoning
***
The telephone solved some organizational problems, but also created some new…
The English historian Sir Lewis Namier (1888 – August 19, 1960) said, the biggest problem in the cold war was
the telephone and the airplane. Professional diplomats with delegated powers have been supplanted by prime
ministers, presidents, and foreign secretaries, who think that they could conduct all important negotiations
personally.
14
15. The child and the teenager understand the telephone embracing the chord and the
ear-mike as if they were beloved pets.
15
16. The typewriter has splintered woman from the home and turned her into a
specialist in the office, the telephone gave her back to the executive world as a
general means of harmony, an invitation to happiness and a sort of combine
confessional and wailing wall for the immature American Executive
Of course, films about that topic had also often to do with a love affair between
the boss and the secretary……(which would in reality be a no-go today)
In general, the telephone created a lot of new possibilities for love communication.
But also for loneliness. Why loneliness?
16
17. Why should the phone create an intense feeling of loneliness?
****
Why should we feel compelled to answer a ringing public phone when we know the
call cannot concern us?
****
Why does a phone ringing on the stage create instant tension?
****
Why is this tension so much less for an unanswered phone in a movie scene?
****
The answer to all of these questions is simply that the phone is a participant form
that demands a partner, with all the intensity of electric polarity. It simply will not
act as a background instrument like radio.
17
18. So what about the telephone today?
McLuhan speculated that the telephone may lose popularity:
Celebrities never answer up to their numbers…. It will soon be the telephone that is
“all alone, feeling blue”
But…
18
19. …. at his time I think McLuhan knew nothing anything about mailboxes or mobile
phones. So the telephone is still very useful for a lot of private and business
purposes:
It is an integral part of our life and business even part of a range of some
completely new business models (e.g. Telephone-Diagnosis in Swiss. This was
invented to save time of the doctors who are scarce today. But interestingly
although the first intent was only cost cutting, they found out another advantage:
intensive listening on the telephone often makes it easier to understand the
patients’ problems than in face to face-communication with the doctor! Because
we are more sensible on the telephone. So the patient often feels better treated.
Also help-hot lines still work best with the telephone.
19
20. Curiously, the newspaper of that time saw the telephone as a rival to the press such
as the radio was in fact to be fifty years later. But in fact the telephone still is the
most important instrument for any journalist.
***
A discussion that accompanied telephone from it’s beginning was the discourse
about “telephone-terror”.
The New York Daily Graphic for March 15,1877, had an article on its front page
about: “The Terrors of the Telephone.”
There is typical “negative” discussion for every new electronic media as is the
discourse about the blessings and advantages of it. I think people who are not used
to it, feel heavily frustrated by the requirements of new media. Mostly, there have
always been some truth in the pessimistic side. For all kinds of manic people, every
new media is a means for terror. As a senior manager said for example:
“I call my employees up at night when their guard’s down.”
20
21. Without the phonograph, the 20th century as the era of tango, ragtime, and jazz
would have had a different rhythm.
When it first occurred, a lot of people felt, that it was obliquely. A famous musician
said: “With the phonograph, vocal exercises will be out of vogue!” It could well
have diminished the individual activity, much as the car had reduced pedestrian
activity. But the phonograph was involved in many misconceptions.
21
22. The inventor of the gramophone didn’t wanted a machine to make music but a
“talking machine”
It was first conceived as a form of auditory writing as the name gramophone
implies (gramma-letters)
It was also called “graphophone”, with the needle in the role of a pen. The idea of a
“talking machine” was especially popular. Thomas Edison was delayed in his
approach to the solution of its problems by considering it at first as a “telephone
repeater”, that is, a storehouse of data from the telephone, enabling the telephone
to “provide invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of momentary and
fleeting communication. So, the record player had to be seen as a kind of phonetic
record of telephone conversation. Hence the name “phonograph”. So he intended
to create an answering machine for the telephone and created a music player
instead. – what a great incident!
***
McLuhan thought that the phonograph was not only a matter of hearing but like all
electric media a tactile experience, that stimulates more areas of the brain. And he
was just right: Hearing is not just a matter of the ears, but we also feel the air with
the skin while speaking certain tones
This enables the brain to distinguish e.g. if a person said “pa” or “ba”.
We also need the eyes for better hearing. If the expression on somebody’s face
doesn’t fit to the content which he just said, we have difficulties to understand it
To be in touch in the presence of performing musicians is to experience their touch
and handling of instruments as tactile and kinetic, not just as resonant. So it can be
said that hi-fi is not any quest for abstract effects of sound in separation from the
other senses. With hi-fi, the phonograph meets the TV tactile challenge.
22
23. The photograph has changed our perception in a very special way. And it was a
enormously fascinating media for all of us, right from the beginning…
23
24. •First known surviving heliographic engraving, 1825 by Josef Nicèphore Niepiece.
•France agreed to pay Daguerre a pension for his formula, in exchange for his
promise to announce his discovery to the world as the gift of France, which he did
1839.
•William Fox Talbot had earlier discovered another means to fix a silver process
image, but had kept it secret. After reading about Daguerre’s invention, Talbot
refined his process so that portraits were made readily available to the masses. By
1940, Talbot invented the cyanotype process, which created negative images. John
Herschel made many contributions to the new methods. He invented the
“Blueprint”.
•It’s maybe not an accident that electrical morsing (invented by Samuel F.B. Morse
1933) and modern photography (by Jacques Daguerre) were invented in the same
year. Dots for the eye (photograph) and dots for the ear (morsing).
24
25. What senses does the photograph enhance?
***
It allows self-realization
The Vogue magazine wrote 1953: A woman now, and without having to leave the
country, can have the best of five (or more) nations hanging in her closet – beautiful
and compatible as a statesman’s dream.”
**
it was a hot media but cooled down in photo arts
25
26. The photograph created the fashion and model industry, it was the age of great
gestures, pantomime. It also inspired dance.
****
But it also created a very cruel industry, which is a sure sign for its numbing effects.
Anorexia is the typical disease in the model business and has influenced a lot of
other girls who lost connection to the perceptions and feelings of their own bodies
For a long time we have witnessed a lot of blindness and hypocrisy in the model
business against the problem. A lot of models died from hunger. Decades went by
with a lot of superficial debates and quickly forgotten scandals. The customer was
king an he (or she) wanted slim models. Today, magazines like Brigitte use ordinary
women with real names. It is a good marketing-strategy that was also by dove with
his “real-beauty-campaign! We will see if the model business will change…
26
27. It is interesting that understanding Photograph needs literacy: It starts
with reading the photograph with the right side up:
“Nothing amuses the Eskimo more than for the white man to crane his neck to see
the magazine pictures stuck on to the igloo walls. For the Eskimo there is no need to
look at a picture right side up like a child before he has learned his letters on a line.”
Natives often do not perceive in perspective or sense the third dimension
Because natives in a way “confuse reality and picture they think you will steal their
soul by beeing photographed (but actually maybe it’s WE who confuse those
things)
That photograph needs literacy is often the reason why we often don’t understand
advertisements. Marketing experts must be aware about a lot of normally
unconscious things: institutions, rules, history, norms and beliefs and feelings. If
you see for example an ad with a happy monk drinking a beer you need to know
for example: that in contrast to other cultures, our religion doesn’t forbid alcohol,
that the monks, especially the Benedictines invented beer because they were not
allowed to drink wine in the period of fasting. The monasteries have a long
tradition in making beer and this is why the picture of a monk should show for the
educated West man how good the beer tastes. (Of course this is mostly not a
positive association for a modern image of a beer – today you must make the
people believe that beer makes slim). Somebody from another culture may think
something else about it ….f.e.: oh what and awful beverage this must be that it is
drunk by old, fat, red-nosed, strange dressed man
“A picture tells more than words” is not right, seen like this – in contrary: Without
words, you would understand not a single picture. Besides: In former beer
advertisements it was presented as a kind of medicine and especially good for
calming down kids……
27
28. Some further typical functions of the photograph according to McLuhan:
The photo camera isolates a single moment in time
It is not like a picture from oil, made for eternity
****
In the Press, it’s function is
To be everywhere and to interrelate things (it created the job of the reporter whose
job it was to take pictures and to comment it.)
**
From typographic man to graphic man (again): Photo is a rival of print, perhaps
usurper of the word, whether written or spoken
****
It created the so called: mosaic form. In print, the development to the mosaic form
was inevitable. Still today some very conservative newspapers are converting to
the mosaic form after they had hesitated for a long time to do so. (e.g. FAZ) Too
much photos in a newspaper still makes literate people angry, for example in our 28
29. Do you like the recorded sound of your voice?
A photo occupies or senses
If we see a photo we think it must be “true”
29
30. Changed whole businesses:
• created not only the fashion industry but also the mail-order business
• newspapers now could advertise every sort of product on one page. That quickly
gave rise to department stores that provided every kind of product under one roof.
30
31. In a way, it turns the world into a museum of objects, especially the famous ones.
What do the pictures show:
Tour Eiffel, Power of Pisa, Grand canyon
If you visit a place that has so often been photographed you can take a picture
yourself and compare it to the pictures you have already seen.
Why do so many Americans travel so much and are changed so little? Because
their travel experience has become “diluted, contrived, prefabricated”
31
32. Last but not least it had an influence on the perception of sports: 1905, in a game
between Pennsylvania and Swarthmore a press photo of battered players came to
the attention of President Roosevelt. He was so angered that he issued an
immediate ultimatum – that if rough play continued, he would abolish the game by
edict.
But, really interestingly
still today, Photos are not allowed as referee evidence! (Neither are videos)
32
33. In the beginning of the 19thcentury , photo coverage of the lives of the rich
“conspicuous consumption”, ordering drinks from the horseback embarrassed
people and led to a new “purism” in consumption habits.
The photograph still today makes it quite unsafe to come out and play”
Even Jürgen Klinsmann doesn’t gesture anymore in press conferences and holds his
hand under the table. Nobody does any gesture, only calculated ones. It is just too
dangerous to be photographed in a bad moment.
33
34. The Photograph influenced art very much: the artistscould not longer depict a
world that had been much photographed. He turned, instead, to reveal the inner
process of creativity Expressionism, Abstract art, Op-Art, et cetera. Also the novelist
could not longer describe objects or happenings for people who already knew what
was happening by photo, press, film and radio
****
In the electronic age, photos can be easily manipulated.
***
Maybe for this reason, photography had recently a big revival in art – Photo art
reaches substantially high prices on the market
34
35. The movie is a high-definition, hot medium
Movie was a speed-up of photograph
The famous stroboscopic photo series of the galloping horse (Eadweard
Muybridge, 1873) can be seen as the predecessor of the motion picture. If you take
pictures of the same moving animal in a very short sequence, you can nearly
imagine the motion physically. This photograph also brought the evidence for
something that good observers already knew for a long time: during galloping
horses only have a very short phase when no single hoof touches the earth.
In England, the movie theater was originally called “The Bioscope”, because of its
visual presentation of the actual movements of the forms of life (from Greek bios,
way of life) On the film, the mechanical appears as organic
The movie, by which we roll op the real world on a spool in order to unroll it as a
magic carpet of fantasy, is a spectacular wedding of the old mechanical technology
(wheel) and the new electric world.
35
36. The first cinematograph was presented in Paris in 1895 by the Lumiere brothers
To a highly literate and mechanized culture, the movie appeared as a world of
triumphant illusions and dreams that money could buy.
It created a new aristocracy of actors and actresses, who dramatized, on and off
the screen, the fantasia of conspicuous consumption
that the rich could never achieve
The glamour and image of the film stars was very different from today’s TV-actors.
McLuhan cites Joanne Woodward, who felt the difference very clearly:
Joanne Woodward in an interview was asked what was the difference between
being a movie star and a TV actress. She replied: When I was in movies, I heard
people say: “There goes Joanne Woodward.’ Now they say, “There goes somebody I
think I know.”
Most TV stars today are men, “cool characters”, most movie stars in the UFA-times
were women and “hot” characters. Major movie stars like Rita Hayworth, Liz Taylor,
and Marilyn Monroe ran into troubled waters in the TV age.
36
37. Movie is not really a single medium like song or the written word, but a collective art form. It needs
different individuals directing color, lightning, sound, acting, speaking. The press, radio and TV, and
the comics are also art forms that depend upon entire teams and hierarchies of skill in corporate
action
Like the print and the photo, movies assume a high level of literacy in their uses (and prove baffling
to the nonliterate.) Our literate eye accepts the mere movement of the camera as it follows or drops
a figure from view is not acceptable to an tribal African film audience. If somebody disappears off
the side of the film, the African wants to know what happened to him. On seeing Charlie Chaplin’s
“The tramp”, the African Audience concluded that Europeans were magicians who could restore life.
Natives, who have very little contact with phonetic literacy and lineal print, have to learn to “see”
photographs or film just as we have to learn our letters
Non-literates do not know how to fix their eyes, as Westerners do, a few feet in front of the movie
screen, or some distance in front of photo. The result is that they move their eyes over the photo or
screen as they might their hands. It is the same habit of using the eyes as hands that makes
European so “sexy” to American women. Only an extremely literate and abstract society learns to fix
the eyes, as we must learn to do in reading the printed page
For this reason it took some time until movies with sound gained success in oral cultures:
Like the oral Russian, the African will not accept sight and sound together. Russians have an
irresistible need for participation that is defeated by adding sound to the visual image. The African
insistence on group participation and on chanting and shouting during films is wholly frustrated by
sound track.
**
When movie came up, Cubism and abstract art occurred in arts:
Cubism, by giving the inside and outside, the top, bottom, back and front and the rest, in two
dimensions, drops the illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole.
37
38. Extension: to put man into another world
The business of the writer or the film-maker is to transfer the reader or viewer from one world, his own, to
another, the world created by typography and film. That is so obvious, and happens so completely, that those
undergoing the experience accept it subliminally and without critical awareness.
It provides a consumer package for all the Cinderellas of the world. it is, therefore no accident
that the movie has excelled as a medium that offers poor people roles of riches and power beyond their
dreams of avarice
***
Hollywood has fought TV mainly by becoming a subsidiary of TV. The film industry is now engaged in supplying
TV programs. But one new strategy has been tried, namely the big-budget picture. The cat is that Technicolor is
the closest the movie can get to the effects of the TV image
**
Of course, movie is still extremely successful, even in China for example. Officially there are only propaganda
film but you can get every Movie as DVD piracy for 1 Euro.
Most people see movies only as entertainment. McLuhan in contrary sees in it an enormous changing
potential for societies. Also, he sees movies as “monster ad” for consumer goods:
President Sukarno of Indonesia announced 1956 to a large group of Hollywood executives that he regarded
them as political radicals and revolutionaries who had greatly hastened change in the East. What the Orient
saw in a Hollywood film was a world in which all the ordinary people had cars and electric stoves and
refrigerators. So the Oriental now regards himself as an ordinary person who has been deprived of the
ordinary’s man birthright.
McLuhan even goes so far saying:
The movie, as much as the alphabet and the printed word, is an aggressive and imperial form that explodes
outward into other cultures
… In America this major aspect of film is merely subliminal. Far from regarding our pictures as incentives to
mayhem and revolution, we take them as solace and compensation, or as form of deferred payment by
daydreaming. But the Oriental is right and we are wrong about this. In fact, the movie is a mighty limb of the
industrial giant. That it is being amputated by when the TV image reflects a still greater revolution going on at
the center of American life. It is natural that the ancient East should feel the political pull and industrial
challenge of the movie industry
38
39. As the electric simultaneity ends specialist learning, the mechanical age and its
achievements (e.g. the assembly line and the big corporation) become more and
more the image of a satire.
The case of Charlie Chaplin helps to illumine this problem. His “Modern Times” was
taken to be a satire on the fragment character of modern tasks...The clown reminds
us of our fragmented state by tackling acrobatic or special jobs in the spirit of the
whole or integral man.
39
40. • The film image offers many more millions of data per second,
•***
• the viewer does not have to make the same drastic reduction of items to form his
impression. He tends instead to accept the full image as a package deal
***
• In contrary to TV, movie is three-dimensional. As in any other mosaic, the third
dimension is alien to TV but it can be superimposed. In TV the illusion of the third
dimension is provided slightly by the stage sets in the studio; but the TV image itself
is a flat two-dimensional mosaic
What would be if the technology stepped up the character of TV image to movie
data level?
Yes, we can. But it would be movie then – with all the characteristics of a movie.
“Could we alter a cartoon by adding details of perspective and light and shade?”
The answer is “Yes,” only it would be no longer a cartoon.
40
41. TV
McLuhan says that the TV involves a high amount of senses and is highly
participative.
I can imagine that this must have sounded odd for his contemporary colleagues
and literate people who thought like me that the TV is only passive,
But this thesis could be confirmed recently by brain studies. TV activates a lot of
brain regions. McLuhan at his time only had anecdotic evidence for his thesis. He
reports a closed-circuit TV instruction in surgery, where medical students told they
had the strange feeling that they seemed not to watch the surgery but performing
it themselves. McLuhan stated further that the hospital is for several reasons the
ideal place for a soap opera.
***
TV is a cold medium.
As I said it offers very little visual information. The picture is as crude and low-
definition as a comic compared with movie.
From the 3 million dots per second, the viewer is able to accept, in an iconic grasp,
only a few dozen seventy or so, from which to shape an image. Also the ear is given
a meager amount of information
***
For literary people, TV is an extremely difficult subject. I think most teachers and
pedagogic oriented people are against it. Funny enough, McLuhan was convinced
that TV it’s most successful function will be not entertainment but education. I tell
you about an interesting experiment about this later. Do you remember Sesame
Street? My mother, who was a teacher didn’t wanted me to watch Sesame Street. 41
42. In a group of simulcasts of several media done in Toronto, TV did a strange flip
Four randomized groups of university students were given the same information at
the same time about the structure of preliterate languages.
One group received the lesson via radio, one from TV, one by lecture, and one read
it.
For all but the reader group the information was passed along in straight verbal
flow by the same speaker without discussion or questions or use of blackboard.
Each group had half an hour of exposure to the material.
Each was asked to fill in the same quiz afterward.
It was quite a surprise to the experimenters when the students performed better
with TV-channeled information and with radio
than they did with lecture and print – and the TV-group stood well above the radio
group.
42
43. Since nothing had been done to give special stress to any of these four media, the
experiment was repeated with other randomized groups.
***
This time each medium was allowed full opportunity to do its stuff. For radio and
TV, the material was dramatized with many auditory and visual features. The
lecturer took full advantage of the blackboard and class discussion. The printed
form was embellished with and imaginative use of typography and page layout to
stress each point in the lecture. All of these media had been stepped up to high
intensity for this repeat of the original performance.
***
Television and radio once again showed results high above lecture and print.
Unexpectedly to the testers, however, radio now stood significantly above
television.
***
It was a long time before the obvious reason declared itself, namely that TV is a
cool, participant medium. When hotted up by dramatization and stingers, it
performs less well, because there is less opportunity for participation.
43
44. In a visually organized educational world, the TV child is an underpriviledged cripple
***
The TV child expects involvement and doesn’t want a specialist job in the future. He
does want a role and a deep commitment to his society.
The TV child cannot see ahead because he wants involvement and he cannot accept
a fragmentary and merely visualized goal or destiny in life.
**
Why did TV hit the Americans more/earlier than the European?
Because the Americans were more influenced by literacy culture
No European country allowed print such precedence. Visually, Europe has always
been shoddy in American eyes. American women, on the other hand, who have
never been equaled in any culture for visual turnout,)have always seemed abstract,
mechanical dolls to Europeans. Tactility is a supreme value in European life.
Europeans have always felt that the English and Americans lacked depth in their
culture. Since radio, and especially since TV, English and American literary critics
have exceeded the performance of any European in depth and subtlety. The beatnik
reaching out for Zen is only carrying the mandate of the TV mosaic out into the
world of word and perception
(Since then, the US became somewhat more European, and Europe became more
American. McLuhan shows this with the example of the car:
There is no cooler medium or hotter issue at present (1962!!! CH) than the small
car. It is like a badly wired woofer in a hi-fi circuit that produces a tremendous
flutter in the bottom. The small European car, like the European paperback and the
European belle, for that matter, was no visual package job. Visually, the entire
batch of European cars are so poor an affair that it is obvious their makers never
thought of them as something to look at. They are something to put on, like pants 44
45. The TV also influenced very deeply the image of politic ans.:
Kennedy was an excellent TV image. He has used the medium with the same
effectiveness that Roosevelt had learned to achieve by radio. With TV, Kennedy
found it natural to involve a nation in the office of the Presidency, both as an
operation and as an image. Potentially, the TV can transform the Presidency as a
monarchic dynasty.
Perhaps it was the Kennedy funeral that most strongly impressed the audience with
the power of TV with the character of corporate participation.
45
47. The image of a “normal man” is best for TV. That’s the reason why a lot of Movie-
Stars declined as TV came up.
It is also the reason why Kennedy performed much better on TV than Nixon.
A talented Image Consultant or moderator can sometimes work on the Image of
people, who are normally not well-suited for TV: On the Jack Paar show for March
8, 1963, Richard Nixon was “Paared down” and remade into a suitable TV image. It
turns out that Mr. Nixon was both a pianist and a composer. With sure tact for the
character of the TV medium, Jack Paar brought out this pianoforte side of Mr.
Nixon, with excellent effects. Instead of the slick, glib, legal Nixon, we saw the
doggedly creative and modest performer. A few timely touches like this would have
quite altered the result of the Kennedy-Nixon campaign.
The success of any TV performer depends on his achieving a low-pressure style of
presentation, although getting his act on the air may require much high-pressure
organization. Castro may be a case in point. In the “Cuban Television One-man
Show”, “Castro shows a seemingly improvised ‘as I go along-style with which he can
evolve politics and govern his country – right on camera. Castro presents himself
like a teacher and “manages to blend political guidance and education with
propaganda so skillfully that it is often difficult to tell where one begins and the
other ends.”
***
TV is a medium that rejects the sharp personality and favors the presentation of
process rather than that of products
The adaption of TV to processes, rather than to the neatly packaged products,
explains the frustration many people experience with this medium in its political
use.
47
48. An important quality of all electric media is that they break existing boundaries.
McLuhan puts this in a kind of poem or line of metaphors under the term “wall”
The telephone: speech without walls
The phonograph: music hall without walls
The photograph: museum without walls
The electric light: space without walls.
The movie, radio, and TV: Classroom without walls.
48
49. The power of printed press today is going to decline constantly for several reasons.
I think Franziska will tell us now something about the situation in the press today
later (or next time?). But if we look on the whole scenery of communication
business and see how print-focused it still is we should keep in mind hat the
printed word has been very powerful for a long time and right from the beginning.
The power of the printing press was and is the reason why a lot of dictators forbid
them. Already Napoleon had to struggle with the press. He was cited by saying:
“Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.”
***
The oldest newspaper is much older than you maybe think: The first newspaper
was called “Relation” and released by Johann Carolus in Boston 1690 (But please
be careful if you read things like this. Some people are very good in suggesting that
they invented something – especially the Swiss and the Americans. As far as I know
there was something like a Business Newspaper or “business letter” that was
carried from the Fugger family over the Alps three centuries before.)
49
50. Again, the combination of two different media imposed a huge speed up.
In the case of the press, it was mainly the telephone/telegraph
The electrically moved instant information made necessary a deliberate artistic aim
in the placing and management of news.
51
51. You may have heard the saying: What is in the press is news. It is interesting, that
McLuhan already put it into the past: What went into the press was news. Today
we can say: what was news yesterday in the Internet, is in the newspaper today. Of
course all newspapers today all have online sites. The problem is: Not a single one
(exept ours) earns money with it. It is a lot of extra effort, that makes newspapers
less profitable.
But the old power of the press is the reason why PR-experts and companies are
still completely focused on the press and find it most important to have a good
coverage in the press. They still think as it was for more than dozens of years: if you
aren’t in the press, you are not news. But it is important not to confuse
unconsciously publicity with Public relations. Often, the “silent” companies are
very “effective”.
***
As a journalist I would say there are a lot of different kinds of text forms and
contents which are very different in style, for example Opinion pieces and
information pieces. So at first when I read the following argument of McLuhan, I
was at first not content with it:
Book and newspaper are confessional in character, creating the effect of inside
story by there mere form, regardless of content.
But I think he was absolutely right. Because that is what people like to read most:
Inside-stories, rumors, not boring information. Pure facts are only a kind of
background for what is the real essence of any newspaper. People want to read
about what they think is a “secret” and intimate, and they like well written opinion
pieces
52
52. It’s a paradox that the press is dedicated to the process of cleansing by publicity,
and yet that, in the electronic world of the seamless web of events, most affairs
must be kept secret. Top secrecy is translated into public participation and
responsibility by the magic flexibility of the controlled leak.
Those who deplore the frivolity of the press and its natural form of group exposure
and communal cleansing simply ignore the nature of the medium and demand that
it be a book, as it tends to be in Europe. The book arrived in Western Europe long
before the newspaper, but Russia and middle Europe developed the book and
newspaper altogether.
•Today, we are witnesses of a decline of the
press
•The TV was NOT the reason for the decline of
the press
•The decline is mainly due to the lack of
advertisement which has gone more and more
to the web
53
53. Most media today rely economically on ads, so they normally mix ads with content
Advertisers pay for space and time in paper and magazine, on radio and TV, that is,
they buy a piece of the reader, listener, or viewer as definitely as if they hired our
homes for a public meeting. They would gladly pay the reader, listener, or viewer
directly for his time and attention if they knew how to do it.
The only way so far devised is to put on a free show.
Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be
found, the press will fold.
As was said, advertisement is itself entertainment and maybe the best content in
many media. I remember that when I studied the ASTA showed the yearly Cannes-
Advertisement spots and we had a lot of fun with it.
****
Movies in America have not developed advertising intervals simply because the
movie itself is the greatest form of advertisement for consumer goods.
(Product placement)
**
McLuhan sees all media that mix ads with other programming are a form of “paid
learning”.
He thinks that we will get content for free or even paid for learning:
In years to come, when the child will be paid to learn, educators will recognize the
sensational press as the forerunner of paid learning. One reason that it was difficult
to see this fact earlier is that the processing and moving of information had not
been the main business of mechanical and industrial world. It is, however, easily the
dominant business and means of wealth in the electric world.”
Today, advertising and PR is becoming more and more invisible. German Telekom 55
54. Why do I present the typewriter here – it is much older than for example movie.
Because I’m coming soon to an end with one of the most important new media of
our times – the computer. And the typewriter is for sure a predecessor of the
computer. A long time, the Computer was used only as a writing machine. So it is
interesting to look on what impact the typewriter had on organizational structures.
Superficially regarded not so much.
But regarded closely, it changed a lot, also in society:
It gave back autonomy to women. When the first female typists hit the business
office in the 1890s, the cuspidor manufacturers read the sign of doom.
The main job for managers now was: dictating:
The invention of the typewriter gave tremendous impetus to the dictating habit…
“It is not uncommon to see Congressman in dictating letters use the most vigorous
gestures as if the oratorical methods of persuasion could be transmitted to the
printed page.”
It also created a revolution in the garment industry “What she (the secretary - CH)
wore every farmer’s daughter wanted to wear, for the typist was a popular figure of
enterprise and skill. She was a style-maker who was also eager to follow styles.
Still the mechanical typewriter is used by many poets because they help them to
indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions, even, of syllables, the
juxtaposition, even, of parts of phrases which he intends, observing that, for the
first time, the poet has the stave and the bar that the musician has had 56
55. The typewriter reached it’s whole scope only together with the telephone. Why?
Because like the telephone, the typewriter fuses functions (call-girls).
****
Together with the telephone, the work to be done by typewriter expanded to huge
dimensions in the same way as E-mail today expanded the work today. Can you
imagine how many e-Mails are sent around today? And not all of them are SPAM –
in contrary, the objective work has risen. How much e-Mail speeded up work is
difficult to understand by people who grew up in the old world of the typewriter or
computers without e-Mail (Which is in fact, nothing more but an electronic
typewriter)
Often, the people said: Oh, send me a memo or letter about that. Today we say:
send me an e-Mail.
***
This is the central paradox of the information age: We create new techniques and
think they will help us to save time and money. Instead, they normally generate
new, additional work before they enhance productivity. Why are old people
astonished about all this “unnecessary work” or “unnecessary communication”?
A man called Northcote Parkinson has discovered 1930 that any business or
bureaucratic structure functions in itself, independently of “the work to be done”.
His famous “Parkinson law” says that “work expands so as to fill the time available
for its completion” .This was precisely the zany dynamic provided by the telephone.
Some people today are shocked by the fact that celebrity in our information age is
not due to a person’s having done something, but simply to his being known for
being well known. Professor Parkinson was scandalized that the structure of
human work now seems to be quite independent of any job to be done.
57
56. And another quote I like very much!
“Neither honest toil nor clever ploy will serve to advantage the eager executive. The
reason is simple. Positional warfare is finished, both in private and corporate
action. In business, as in society, “getting on” may mean getting out. There is no
“ahead” in a world that is an echo chamber of instantaneous celebrity”
Undoubtedly, electronic media have the power to destroy hierarchies (but
hierarchy and bureaucracy are not always bad!) and dictatorships. But maybe
McLuhan was much too optimistic about the information-communism that is
created by electronic media. In the same way, people who hope that the internet
will create a fairer and better world are maybe sometimes too optimistic. Often the
knowledge of elites is protected by very subtle mechanisms.
58
57. But the typewriter also had enormous direct effects on the organization of labor:
“A modern battleship needed dozens of typewriters for ordinary operations. An
army needs more typewriters than medium and light artillery pieces, even in the
field, suggesting that the typewriter now fuses the functions of the pen and sword.
Interestingly, the typewriter for McLuhan did not fully stand for the print culture.
There were already a sign for the further development – the computer. The
travelling typewriter already had a kind of “take-away-print culture”. If you may say,
an early mechanical version of the laptop…
And as such, it had some characteristics of electronic media, e.g. the integration of
functions and private independence. You could for example take work at home or
in vacations.
59
58. With the computer, we are at the end of our McLuhan-travel through centuries of
media-development
I don’t know if McLuhan could have foresee the massive use of computers. As you
will see if you would read his books he had a very clear picture of the computer
world although he seldom talks explicitly about them
60
59. Just to give you an impression:
Of course, the computer has changed whole industries, businesses an our whole
working life. Toda we also can observe what the computer does with our brains
An ordinary working day for many people: checking e-mail 50 times, between 50-
350 mails per day, calling Instant Messenger 80 times, gaming, looking for
information in the internet…..
***
It could be showed that interactive media let some abilities bloom whereas other
diminish.
Computer games for example educate the fast handling of information and stimuli
but also reduce the ability to pay attention and can create hyperactivity. While
gaming, the brain spills a lot of dopamine
***
Some see computer games as ideal training for skills people will need in the
organizations of tomorrow, some see them as destroying old cultural skills like
reading
61
61. From individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, with a “tribal base”.
Google for example segments its customers in tribes. The importance of the
concept of corporate culture and participation shows how important tribe values
are becoming.
***
All electric applications, far from being labor-saving devices, are new forms of
work, decentralized and made available to everybody.
***
Without moralizing, it can be said that the electric age, by involving all men deeply
in one another, will come to reject mechanical solutions. It is more difficult to
provide uniqueness and diversity than it is to impose the uniform patterns of mass
education; but it is such uniqueness and diversity that can be fostered under electric
conditions as never before: Now, it pays to laugh at the mechanical and the merely
standardized. The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns. We
are suddenly eager to have things and people declare their beings totally. There is a
deep faith to be found in this new attitude – a faith that concerns the ultimate
harmony of all being. (I would say: That is the central myth of the internet age CH)
***
Today, nationalism as an image still depends on the press, but has all the electric
media against it.
***
As we begin to react in depth to the social life and problems of our global village,
we become reactionaries. Involvement that goes with our instant technologies
transforms the most socially conscious people into conservatives. (Examples: retro-
chic, “old-fashioned” values like virginity, country style, garden work…) 64
62. Electric speed mingles the cultures of prehistory with the dregs of industrial
marketers, the nonliterate with the semiliterate and the postliterate.
***
Mental breakdown of varying degrees is the very common result of uprooting and
inundation with new information and endless new patterns of information.
***
In the age of space-time we seek multiplicity, rather than repeatability, of rhythms.
This is the difference between marching soldiers and ballet.
***
“in the electronic age, men becomes a kind of collector (again). McLuhan says:
“Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information gatherer. In this
role, electronic man is no less a nomad than his paleolithic ancestors.”
***
65
63. Cluetrain manifest
Companies and organization will try to create an image as “organic” and human,
let employees speak for „themselves“ try to use “natural” language and imitate
“street credibility. But these efforts will often fail.
In general, participation and involvement, emotions, cultural values, altruism and
relations will play a big role.
But also some lower instincts….
66
64. As long as big industry companies exist (and I hope they will exist for a long time)
they will be forced more and more to practice hypocrisy
One of the most “effective” forms of hypocrisy is by promising to avoid hypocrisy in
the future and hypocrisy that is not committed consciously
Everybody will be his own PR-expert („Ich-AG)
It will be very easy to make PR for customer oriented, little knowledge companies
and social organizations. The public will trust those organization almost blindly
67
66. The classical PR-Department will be more and more perceived as a dinosaur from
the industrial age.
Some companies have already abandoned their PR-department.
Companies and organization will try to be more “organic” and human, let
employees speak for „themselves“ try to use “natural” language and imitate “street
credibility, but these efforts will often fail.
A special form of hypocrisy in the electric age is renaming PR.
Public relations => Public Consultants. Deekeling Arndt Advisors has spinned-off his
PR-activities and is now named „Kaikom Agentur für Kommunikation“.
GPRA (Gesellschaft Public Relations Agenturen) is searching for a new name
without „PR“
69
70. McLuhan seems to be a little bit mixed about that. On the one hand he thinks that
And it seems at least very difficult to control or change media if we are so
unconscious about them.
On the other hand there are other quotes which suggest that media are
controllable
Can or should we control media?
McLuhan is mixed about that topic. In general he thinks the consequences of
media are inevitable becaus media lock our minds and senses as the upper quote
shows. But he thinks we can become more consciously if we understand them
better and
Sometimes he seems to be very convinced that we can even control media like the
quote below shows But maybe this is just ironic?
We are certainly coming within conceivable range of a world automatically
controlled to the point where we could say, „Six hours less radio in Indonesia next
week or there will be a great falling off in literary attention.“ Or, „We can program
twenty more hours of TV in South Africa next week to cool down the tribal
temperature raised by radio last week. Whole cultures could now be programmed
to keep their emotional climate stable in the same way that we have begun to
know something about maintaining equilibrium in the commercial economies of the
worlds.
(Only literate societies are at loss as they encounter the new structures of opinion
and feeling that result from instant and global information. They are still in the ‘grip
of “points of view” and of habits of dealing with things one at a time. Such habits 73
71. Anyway, to keep pace with the electronic age we will have to change often, we like
change our images from time to time, companies are already engaged in constant
changing since decades et cetera. The problem is, for organizations, that change
efforts often seem to fail. Consultants say that more than 70 % of any
transformation efforts fail.
I cannot go deeper into that topic of change management (I worked on it for years)
but just as a hint: It will be much easier if we change our thinking first. Or, maybe,
at first change the way we think about thinking. We think for example that we
think with our brain. But that is simply not true:
****
“The brain is not thinking, neither does your pancreas think. It’s just organic
matter. The human being thinks and utilizes the brain for that. Thinking is not
taking place in an isolated inner world. You think different, if you feel different, i.e.
if your body is in a completely different state. And you always think in contact with
other human beings.”
(Thomas Fuchs, Psychiatrist and Philosopher)
76
72. Change in the Electronic age also has to be holistic. I like this quote very much, it
stems from Margaret Mead, the American cultural anthropologist:
„There are too many complaints about society having to move too fast to keep up
with the machine. There is great advantage in moving fast if you move completely,
if social, educational, and recreation changes keep pace. You must change the
whole pattern at once and the whole group together – and the people themselves
must decide to move“
“Never doubt that a small group of people of committed people can change the
world. Indeed, It’s the only thing that ever has.”
77
73. As McLuhan thin the artist are ahead, they will be the most influential
communication experts (and change managers) in the future …
78
74. The best advice to avoid a PR-Problem today there is still a very old-fashioned, but
very effective way: performance
79
