McLuhan on CBC (May 18, 1960)
Marshall McLuhan can be seen on a
YouTube clip from a CBC (Canadian
Broadcasting Company) television program entitled Explorations aired on May 18, 1960 on what must have been an early
experience for him performing on the relatively new medium.
McLuhan, 49 years old, looks sturdy and vigorous, a ruddier appearance than the somewhat gaunt look he would take on over the course of the next two decades, an incredible journey by anyone’s standards. McLuhan wears a heavy wool suit and betrays an eager enthusiasm, possibly because he wrote the script for the Explorations episode, as his biographer Philip Marchand reports, as part of a media education curriculum designed for 11th grade students. (Marchand 158) The clip indicates a beginning step in McLuhan’s journey to educate the world to the ways of electronic media. McLuhan tosses off challenging concepts, more easily comprehended fifty years after the CBC video presentation, but delivered with a steady optimism. He introduces a colloquialism—“with it” as central to grasping his main point, the connectedness of post-literate, electronic man in a global family. McLuhan’s aesthetic, equal parts dedicated instructor and Promethean gift-giver, offers nothing less than a series of earth-shattering notions presented as cheerfully as the day’s algebra lesson. The video gains charm by its timing, prior to McLuhan gaining world fame, and reveals McLuhan firmly in command of a Weltanschauung for Echo Land well in advance of the publication of The Gutenberg Galaxy 1962) and Understanding Media (1964).
The YouTube clip extends just over 8 minutes (8:43), a small segment of a half-hour show devoted to the subject of teenagers. At the end of the clip McLuhan comments on the difference between adolescents (print era) and teenagers (electronic era); adolescents with their training in individualist print culture are always searching for personal identity while teenagers, a product of electronic culture, seek group identity.
The camera shows Alan Millar, the CBC host for the program, standing before a pay telephone at the edifice of an appliance store. Millar, a man of soothing voice and good TV hair, serves as puppet for McLuhan’s ideas. He states the world “is now a global village.” Millar hesitates a full beat, a pregnant pause, and repeats the phrase slowly… “a global village. ” He allows time for “global village” to sink into the minds of the 11th grade audience and the next camera shot displays a bookcase, a “symbol of the age just past,” a time when we “had just one medium.” The plot thickened and the stage well set, McLuhan enters the frame to resolve matters lest the audience mourn excessively over the loss of the book with an explanation of the phrase “with it.” By “with it” we mean “we’ve understood completely, we’ve got the message as it were in every way possible.” As for the print era man “they were not with it, they were away from it, by themselves with their own private point of view.”
McLuhan’s logic sounds airtight, but the 1960 audience may lack reference points for understanding the significance of being “with it.” The Beatles and hippies have not yet happened and the introduction of CNN and MTV are twenty years in the future. McLuhan offers help in the next few sentences:
"The new media has made everything into a single unit like a continually sounding tribal drum where everybody gets the same message all the time… a princess gets married in England, an earthquake in North Africa, a Hollywood star gets drunk… I use the word tribal. It’s probably the key word of this whole half-hour."
McLuhan has circled back to the concept of globalism, beginning the scenario with the term global village and ending with the story of the tribal drum. Millar delivers a line straight from McLuhan’s script designed to acknowledge the viewer’s distance from such abstruse subject matter as media and connectivity. Millar asks, “Aren’t media, as I think most of us feel, on the edges of our life?”
“Media is at the heart of our life because the media work through our senses,” answers McLuhan.
The video clip features provocative set design, the placement of a pay phone in front of an appliance store. Consumers from the sixties viewed television as properly placed alongside refrigerators and dishwashers in an appliance store. The telephone, however, seemed divorced from television. The telephone, managed by the AT&T monopoly, seemed like a utility service similar to the water utility or lighting department, and hardly related to the television industry. McLuhan, of course, saw things differently. He tied telephone and television together as communication media even though nobody imagined a way to talk back to their television set. Today we interact constantly with both our telephone and television and communicate between them. CNN broadcasters regularly encourage us to tweet our viewpoints, send personal reports or photos, or vote our perspective on the topics of the day. McLuhan’s educational program anticipates the convergence of phone and television communications and, no doubt, would have added computers to the discussion should anybody have had the least clue to what he meant.
McLuhan, 49 years old, looks sturdy and vigorous, a ruddier appearance than the somewhat gaunt look he would take on over the course of the next two decades, an incredible journey by anyone’s standards. McLuhan wears a heavy wool suit and betrays an eager enthusiasm, possibly because he wrote the script for the Explorations episode, as his biographer Philip Marchand reports, as part of a media education curriculum designed for 11th grade students. (Marchand 158) The clip indicates a beginning step in McLuhan’s journey to educate the world to the ways of electronic media. McLuhan tosses off challenging concepts, more easily comprehended fifty years after the CBC video presentation, but delivered with a steady optimism. He introduces a colloquialism—“with it” as central to grasping his main point, the connectedness of post-literate, electronic man in a global family. McLuhan’s aesthetic, equal parts dedicated instructor and Promethean gift-giver, offers nothing less than a series of earth-shattering notions presented as cheerfully as the day’s algebra lesson. The video gains charm by its timing, prior to McLuhan gaining world fame, and reveals McLuhan firmly in command of a Weltanschauung for Echo Land well in advance of the publication of The Gutenberg Galaxy 1962) and Understanding Media (1964).
The YouTube clip extends just over 8 minutes (8:43), a small segment of a half-hour show devoted to the subject of teenagers. At the end of the clip McLuhan comments on the difference between adolescents (print era) and teenagers (electronic era); adolescents with their training in individualist print culture are always searching for personal identity while teenagers, a product of electronic culture, seek group identity.
The camera shows Alan Millar, the CBC host for the program, standing before a pay telephone at the edifice of an appliance store. Millar, a man of soothing voice and good TV hair, serves as puppet for McLuhan’s ideas. He states the world “is now a global village.” Millar hesitates a full beat, a pregnant pause, and repeats the phrase slowly… “a global village. ” He allows time for “global village” to sink into the minds of the 11th grade audience and the next camera shot displays a bookcase, a “symbol of the age just past,” a time when we “had just one medium.” The plot thickened and the stage well set, McLuhan enters the frame to resolve matters lest the audience mourn excessively over the loss of the book with an explanation of the phrase “with it.” By “with it” we mean “we’ve understood completely, we’ve got the message as it were in every way possible.” As for the print era man “they were not with it, they were away from it, by themselves with their own private point of view.”
McLuhan’s logic sounds airtight, but the 1960 audience may lack reference points for understanding the significance of being “with it.” The Beatles and hippies have not yet happened and the introduction of CNN and MTV are twenty years in the future. McLuhan offers help in the next few sentences:
"The new media has made everything into a single unit like a continually sounding tribal drum where everybody gets the same message all the time… a princess gets married in England, an earthquake in North Africa, a Hollywood star gets drunk… I use the word tribal. It’s probably the key word of this whole half-hour."
McLuhan has circled back to the concept of globalism, beginning the scenario with the term global village and ending with the story of the tribal drum. Millar delivers a line straight from McLuhan’s script designed to acknowledge the viewer’s distance from such abstruse subject matter as media and connectivity. Millar asks, “Aren’t media, as I think most of us feel, on the edges of our life?”
“Media is at the heart of our life because the media work through our senses,” answers McLuhan.
The video clip features provocative set design, the placement of a pay phone in front of an appliance store. Consumers from the sixties viewed television as properly placed alongside refrigerators and dishwashers in an appliance store. The telephone, however, seemed divorced from television. The telephone, managed by the AT&T monopoly, seemed like a utility service similar to the water utility or lighting department, and hardly related to the television industry. McLuhan, of course, saw things differently. He tied telephone and television together as communication media even though nobody imagined a way to talk back to their television set. Today we interact constantly with both our telephone and television and communicate between them. CNN broadcasters regularly encourage us to tweet our viewpoints, send personal reports or photos, or vote our perspective on the topics of the day. McLuhan’s educational program anticipates the convergence of phone and television communications and, no doubt, would have added computers to the discussion should anybody have had the least clue to what he meant.
The 1960 clip reveals McLuhan’s fondness for revelations gained from colloquial speech, his clever use of the metaphor “global village,” so powerful it is repeated to the present day, strange retrieval of past functions, the drumbeat of tribalism being revived by electric circuitry, and the fierce impact of a new media environment—the electronic media, a rival the book. McLuhan viewed media as extensions of our bodies and as reshaping our sensory balance. He intentionally concluded on the interface, how we access media through our senses. Imagine the video if McLuhan had designed it for 12th graders!
McLuhan famously descried any concern with the content of TV shows. He studied television from a macro perspective, anticipating the ways television has become part of a spectrum of environmental services. He felt the debate over the “false claims of advertising” was wasted effort in comparison to decoding Madison Avenue’s power for “icon-making and image making,” decades before these views could be fully understood. And possibly not yet understood.
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