Would the people right at the back, please come to that center microphone. In the
meantime over here, yes. "Quite some time ago you said that life was very much like driving a
car but only being able I look into the rear vision mirror. After you've gone who's
going to drive the bus?" I made a strange discovery about the rearview mirror.
Having accused a lot of people of living in the rearview mirror and having meant
by that that they were out of date, that they were nineteenth-century mimes, I
then took another look into the rearview mirror on my own. I was not criticized. I
did this on my own and I discovered somewhat to my surprise that when you look in
the rearview mirror you do not see what has gone past. You see what is coming. And
the rearview mirror is the foreseeable future; it is not the past at all. They
title the phrase rearview mirror appears to distort the situation. Most people
think of it instinctively from the sound of the phrase it must be the past.
In terms of media of course the thing that is occupying the foreground in
terms of the rear view mirror is nostalgia. Nostalgia is the name of the
game in every part of our world today, including the program roots. But
nostalgia well, it's a kind of rear view mirror of your life, but it's
also the shape of things to come. When people have been stripped of their
private identities, they develop huge nostalgia and nostalgia for the jeans
and Levi's off the young today are nostalgia for granddad's overalls. His
work clothes now become the latest costume. But this is a rather mysterious
thing. The costumes worn by the young, the fashionable costumes, are really very
old hat and nostalgic. And someone called the International motley that the
costumes worn by the young today are a kind of international motley or clown
costume and paradoxically the clown is a person with a grievance. His role in
medieval society was to be the voice of grievance. The clown's job was to tell the
Emperor or tell the royalty exactly what was wrong with the society. He often lost
his head in the process but the clown, the International motley of our time, the
clown is trying to tell us his grievance. The beards and the hairdos and the
costumes of the young are a manifestation of grievance and anger. You've
heard about the streakers, a kind of manifestation of anger about the lack of
jobs and goals in our world. In America we call them passing fannies but
I understand it has a different meaning here. "Professor, I'm asking this question which i think
is very relevant for people today who are looking for an identity, who are
searching for a kind of responsible attitude towards the media, since in the
20th century it was so conditioned,
hemmed in by the media. Should we be teaching our children what value
judgments they should really make concerning different programs they
should watch on TV or different programs they should listen on the radio as part
of their development of achieving adult maturity?" Answer's yes, but the one of the
peculiarities of electric speed is that it pushes all the unconscious
factors up into consciousness. This began with Freud and Einstein back in nineteen
hundred but the hidden aspects of the media are the things that should be
taught because they have an irresistible force when invisible. When these factors
remain ignored and invisible, they have an absolute power over the user, so yes, the
sooner that the population or the young or old can be taught the effects of
these forms, the sooner we can have some sort of reasonable technology among the
media themselves. What is desperately needed is a kind of understanding of the
media which would permit us to program the whole environment so that say
literate values would not be wiped out by new media. If you understand the
nature of these forms you can neutralize some of their adverse effects and foster
some of their beneficient effects. We have never reached
this level of awareness.
"We can never reach that level of awareness -" I have been working for that for a long
time.
You may be surprised to hear that the Finnegans Wake of Mr. James Joyce is
one of the top guides to the effects of media. The work is entirely devoted to
that theme and the thunders in Finnegans Wake are statements of the
effects of particular media. The last thunder and Finnegans Wake on page 424
is television and with all its effects
social consequences carefully dramatized, Finnegans Wake is a drama, it's a play. And the
actors in the play are the media themselves. Very few Joyceans
know this. "Professor McLuhan, up until now, while television may have dominated our minds and our lives
the actual box in the corner hasn't dominated our living room but
large-screen television sets are being developed, screens say the size of a
living room wall. What effect do you think that will have? Will we tolerate
Giants watching us?" It's a I think very important thing to keep in mind, very
important question. I am not personally - I haven't seen those big screens. They
tend to have them out on the playgrounds or the play fields in America. They tend to
have these great big screens for the game itself so that you can watch the
game on television while the game is in process. This is a kind of situation that
I think it invites an enormous awareness of actual process to
participate in the kind of replay of the thing while it is still ongoing.
Participation in replay is a form of pattern recognition that is new in the
media and has I'd say rather large consequences, mostly cognitive, mostly
consequences that will affect our nature of our cognition and awareness and I
would think entirely only in the direction of extreme self-awareness.
I once asked a famous quarterback in American football on television, once
asked him what the effect of the instant replay had been on the game of football
and he said we have now to play the game in such a way that the audience can
watch the actual process that we're performing. They're not any longer
interested just in the effect of the play, they want to see the nature of the
play. So they've had to open up the play on the field to enable the audience to
participate more fully in the process of football play. It's an unexpected effect. I
think it would be an effect that would extend also to our educational, well to the
classroom. That the future of education requires that we pay much attention to
the media we're employing as forms of study.
Not necessarily of merely the hardware
skill and the use of cameras and microphones but awareness of the nature
of the operation. "When you said the television uses the eyes and ear, what do you mean by that?" It is a phrase of
Tony Schwartz in a
very interesting book called The Responsive Chord.
What he means literally is that the image is constituted by millions of
these resonating particles. There are no pictures on television, there
are no snapshots, there's no shutter there's no camera. There is an
outpouring of these small bits of information in patterns that are
entirely active and dynamic. So they resonate. So he was really saying that
the television image is primarily not a visual but resonating form of experience.
"Professor McLuhan, is television the ultimate medium, or is there worse to come?" You've heard of the hologram. The hologram goes completely around you. Your
television only goes a little bit around you. The hologram is 360 degrees but it's been
anticipated by the rock music in which you have to become enclosed in a
sound bubble the hologram does for TV what rock does for auditory
entertainment. But the hologram is technically here. "Professor McLuhan, earlier you spoke about going out for our
privacy and coming home for the social aspect. I'd like to hear you comment on
that in relation to electronic man's new thirst for meditation, contemplation,
mystical experience."
Well, being asked about the relation of this inside outside on the life of
meditation.
Well as you know the transcendental meditation has become exceedingly
popular. All forms of mystic meditation have become very popular in our television
age. The east, we have gone very far to the east
since television. Just as an exercise in awareness and so on
meditation has come in very big since television.
I'm not sure that that is good or bad at
all, it just has happened and do you think of it as a very significant event?
"I think of it as very significant, yes. It seems to me to be almost like a nostalgia for a return to that private self without going
outdoors to find it. A return to an inner union with God, with yourself, which an electronic man seems
to need and is looking for in this way."
Jane Austen of all people has quite a big comment on that inside outside. She said
that people go outside to be alone just to prove their inner resources. That they
don't need people. We can make it alone. And that the Romantic movement was based
upon this psychic development. Jane Austen has quite a bit to say about that, of
all people. I was amazed to come across it in her work a few months ago but
there's another American writer, Hawthorne who regarded this American habit of
going outside to be alone as an undermining of democracy. He said this is
sheer aristocracy. This is putting on the aristocratic thing and it is going to
undermine our whole democracy. So Hawthorne regarded it with great alarm.
The moralist by the way is always a private person who never studies effects
so much as studies the content of situations.
He studies the figure and not the ground. This i think is a great concern to
advertisers who are here tonight in some numbers. Advertisers tend to study
figure not the ground. They tend to count noses rather than to estimate the
pressures under the noses. The form of "nosis." "Do we have an advertiser who
would like to pick that up or..."