Television is cool and radio is hot. That's the message, and the medium is Marshall McLuhan.
Good evening. Welcome to Monday Conference which has often been said to be not so hot.
When future historians look back on the twentieth century, it's almost certain that one of the
statements from this era which they will treasure the posterity, is the medium is the message.
Like many of Marshall McLuhan's statements, it's pithy, apparently simple, and provocative
to the point of being outrageous. Another of his propositions is that some media are
cool and some are hot. Marshall McLuhan studies the media as a way of understanding what it
is that makes us live in the way we do - as a way of understanding society itself. He's
concerned with all media, but he's best known for his work on the electronic media, particularly
radio and television. He sees them as the extension of our central nervous system, and
argues that they're leading to an electrical retribalization of the west. If there is a
Mr. Electric of the twentieth century, it's Marshall McLuhan. More formally, he's professor
of English at the University of Toronto, Canada, and director of the Center for Culture and
Technology there. Among Professor McLuhan's books are The Mechanical Bride, War and Peace
in the Global Village, and of course, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Marshall McLuhan
has been brought to Australia by the Sydney radio station 2SM, to address a seminar on
the commercial broadcasting and music industries. Earlier tonight, Professor McLuhan gave his
address, and now he's ready for questions from the audience with us, made of the participants
in the seminar and members of the general public. Well Professor McLuhan, I think we'd
better deal with the medium is the message before it does go into the twenty-first century.
When you said the medium is the message, does that leave any room at all for criticism of
individual, say, television programs?
Well, content. You see, it doesn't much matter what you say on the telephone. The telephone
as a service is a huge environment. That is the medium. The environment affects everybody.
What you say on the telephone affects very few. The same with radio or any other medium.
What you print is nothing compared to the effect of the printed word. The printed word
sets up a paradigm: a structure of awareness which affects everybody in very, very drastic
ways and it doesn't very much matter what you print as long as you go on with that form
of activity.
You've said that television promotes illiteracy. I'm wondering whether you think that's a bad
thing.
I don't think it promotes illiteracy. I think it creates another form of awareness. Literacy
had a very strange antecedence, a very strange effect on people. We're only beginning to
notice what those effects were now that it tends to be pushed aside. The literacy as
a form of awareness is a highly specialist and objective sort of thing. The literate
man can stand back objectively and look at situations. The TV person has no objectivity
at all.
Does television sight promote illiteracy or doesn't it?
It tends to create a totally different kind of awareness which is rather that of involvement.
Literacy is objective. TV is subjective. Totally involving.
In fact, do people who watch a lot of television or listen to a lot of radio, do they read
more, or read less, or what?
I think radio people are far more literate than TV people. This is complementarity of
the media. I personally have avoided making valued judgments because I long ago discovered
that value judgements are so personal that it confuses people enormously.
Yes, but that is a kind of valued judgment itself, isn't it?
Not of a medium, but of people. People are very diversified. It's been known for a long
time that a reader - for example, the word 'read,' 'to read,' means to guess. Look it
up in the big dictionary. The word radon means to guess. Reading is actually an activity
of rapid guessing. Because any word has so many meanings, including the word reading,
many many meanings, that to select one in a context of other words, requires very rapid
guessing. That's why a good reader tends to be a very quick decision-maker. A good reader,
a highly literate person, tends to be a good executive. Because he has to make decisions
very fast while reading. The very nature of reading calls for quick decisions and guessing.
That's the word means: to guess. Radon.
One last point for me. You said that advertising is the folk art of the twentieth century.
In what sense is it an art?
I think it is a very great art form. Not a private art form, it's corporate. The concern
of the advertiser is to make an effect. Any painter, any artist, any musician sets out
to create an effect. He sets a trap to catch somebody's attention. Any painter, any poet,
any musician sets a trap for your attention. That is the nature of art.
Do you think there are any masterpieces of advertising or radio or television in the
sense that they are masterpieces?
We'll know better in fifty years.
What's your guess now?
I know that there are. On the other hand, the ones we might select now, the great ads
of the year, would probably not get the same vote fifty years from now. Remember now Mr.
Shakespeare wrote plays that were considered very vulgar and popular entertainment in his
own day. Nobody had any criteria for measuring his greatness at that time. He was a popular
artist. TV is a popular folk art. We have no criteria for measuring it. The measurements
that we do use are just results. Bottom line. How many sales resulted from this particular
ad? That's box office.
Thank you. Now someone from the audience, please.
Yes.
If the medium is the message, and it doesn't matter what we say on TV, why are we all here
tonight, and why am I asking this question?
I didn't say it didn't matter what you asked on TV. I said that the effect of TV - the
message of TV - is quite independent of the program. That is, there is a huge technology
involved in TV which surrounds you physically. The effect of that huge surface environment
on you personally is vast. The effect of the program is incidental.
Please, would you show your undoubted enthusiasm by having your hands up? It really does make
it much easier if I can see. I'm sorry to be - yes.
...we as students know how clearly you define a problem for us. We also know that very often
you point to an answer too. Earlier in your talk this evening you spoke about the search
for identity through violence. I think we'd all agree now if we ever could afford violence,
as weaponry becomes more efficient, we can no longer corporately afford violence. So
what do you suggest as alternatives that we offer instead of the search for identity through
violence?
Dialogue. The alternative to violence is dialogue, which is a kind of encounter interfaced with
other people and situations. Yes, we live in a world in which we have so much power.
In the old days you could fire a trigger on a revolver and hurt people, but today when
you trigger these vast media that we use, you are manipulating entire populations. The
kinds of violence that we can now exert collectively are such as to require the situation to cool
right down - cool, cool, cool. We have by means of the overkill created a kind of universal
peace in the world. The means of destruction are so vast at our command that war becomes
unthinkable. In the same way, people are cooled off by media and by situations which require
dialogue rather than just self expression. Violence is a kind of self expression. The
quest for identity... the person who is struggling to find out 'who am I' by all sorts of maladjustments,
all sorts of quarrels, all sorts of encounters, such a person is a social nuisance, of course.
The quest for identity goes along with this bumping into other people in order to find
out 'who am I,' 'how much power can I exert,' 'how much identity can I discover that I possess,'
by simply banging into other people. That's what I had in mind when I said that the quest
for identity is always a violent quest. It's a series of adventures and encounters that
create all sorts of disturbance. I don't think you have to go very far in literature for
examples. Ovitt, I suppose, Don Quixote. There's a great popular hero, and Flash Gordon. Superman.
We are now beginning to get a, I'm thinking of this new show. The Star War - the new Hollywood
thing, that is based on Flash Gordon comics. The Bionic Man, Bionic Woman. These are vicarious
forms of violence in which young people are trying to discover 'who am I.' I once asked
to one of my granddaughters who was then six "what do you want to be when you grow up?"
And she said instantly, Bionic Woman! This is a kind of violence that permits one to
discover who you are. I was using violence in a rather large sense. Of simply encounter,
abrasive encounters.
In terms of the Figure Ground thesis that you put forward in Cynthia's classroom, Professor,
in what way would the message that you have given us tonight be different if this meeting,
instead of being here in the Sydney Hilton Hotel were, say, in the center of the Sydney
Cricket Ground?
Well, cricket is a very organized form of violence. I would insist on studying the game
of cricket as a manifestation of the controlled forms of violence in the community. Baseball
or football, any kind of sport is a dramatization of the typical and accepted forms of violence
in the business community. You can learn enormous amount about the business community by studying
the rules and procedures in cricket or baseball or golf, as far as that goes. All these games
are huge ways of discovering - dramatizing - what the society you're in is all about. By
the way, without an audience, these games would have no meaning at all. They have to
be played in front of a public in order to acquire their meaning. A baseball game without
an audience would be a rehearsal only, a practice. The game requires a public, and the public
has to resemble a whole cross-section of the community. I'm very interested in games as
dramatizings of violent behavior - under control.
McLuhan, seeing you know so much about cricket, well the problem is, where to put the commotions
apparently when you broadcast cricket! There's nowhere to put them! Does this mean the game
has to change to fit television, or what?
I have been paying attention to cricket for the last few days I've been here. But it's
a game I did not grow up with.
So you can't answer the question?
No. I'm not sure. But you say where to put the commotion.
Yes. There's no room for it.
You mean that it is so continuous- I see. a seamless web.
Where you normally put them is a bit where all the theology of the game comes across.
And all the inner thoughts. There was a woman - yes, back there -