McLuhan at Authors Luncheon (Dec 1966)

http://www.wnyc.org/story/146063-marshall-mcluhan/

(Listen to a few minutes of McLuhan on Sara Fishko's radio show-- see link above)

Marshall McLuhan’s 36-minute lecture, “Address to the Author’s Luncheon,” a talk delivered to members of the book publishing industry on Dec. 7, 1966 at the Shoreham Hotel in New York City, provides a window to his principles or probes, as he preferred to call his mental explorations. Early in his talk McLuhan states he no longer used the term "global village," for "global theater" is more appropriate. People are no longer interested in jobs, they want roles. People want involvement in the electronic environment, and are no longer satisfied with being a cog in a machine. The machine, the old industrial environment, had passed and the world was moving to an electronic environment. McLuhan's speech works to prepart the audience of publishers for a revolution in their world, a revolution he felt was well underway. I will trace the first thirteen minutes of McLuhan’s talk and number each of McLuhan first four points. 

1) “Humor is grievance.” (4:30)

McLuhan makes his first serious point, an observation on the nature of comedy. Jokes in Canada revolve around bilingualism and the problems of French Canada but a new round of jokes resulted from “a new interface, a new irritation area” and led to “great floods of Newfie jokes” much like the Italian and Polack jokes making the rounds in the United States. 

"Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment—of what’s really going on—affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions. (The Medium is the Massage   92)

2) Children’s reading distance is 4.6 inches. (7:00 min.)

McLuhan’s talk swings quickly to TV viewing and the change in children’s near point reading distance likely resulting from television viewing habits. McLuhan comments “the average reading distance for a grade two child is 4.6” from the printed page.” He admonishes the publishers: “The printed page you provide is useless for TV child. The TV child is a Cyclops, only uses one eye. He’s a hunter, he’s not a reader.” McLuhan intrigues and frustrates with these remarks though the audience listens politely and attentively. The TV child “cannot see ahead because he wants involvement.”

McLuhan’s hint at chastisement for the publishing audience reflects a level of dismay at their lack of recognition of Rome burning around them. The publishers can be excused for their tepid response to McLuhan’s news on children. McLuhan’s comments directed at children’s books were only a preview for his next warning for the publishing industry-- the transition from hardware to software.

McLuhan uses lighthearted name-dropping as a method for preparing the audience for heavier material. He mentioned Timothy Leary, being neighbors with Jack Paar and an encounter with Ann Landers, the gossip columnist. He adds some more quip but stops quickly with the comment: “Xerox is software.

3) The Publisher’s Grievance—interface of Hardware vs. Software.  (11:30)

McLuhan switched directions quickly, connecting point #1, humor is grievance, to point #2, your industry is changing, and pronounces with some authority: You have a big grievance; you don’t know how to get off the hardware hook into software. Xerox is software, and you’re still in the hardware business. Get off the hardware hook and get into software.” The book publishers, he instructs, look in the wrong place for the future—at books. The future is software. Software suggests the scene from The Graduate when Benjamin  (Dustin Hoffman) gets a single word of advice— plastics-- for preparing for the future. McLuhan’s word is software and, of course, he is correct!

“I don’t have very much time,” he tells the audience. McLuhan planned for an entire speech and may only be allotted twenty minutes of speaking time. The speech eventually covered thirty-six minutes. McLuhan pinpointed the future of the publishing industry as the battle between hardware vs. software in a roomful of ink-stained New York publishers. He emphasized the prohibitive expense of hardware production where producing a single page document for office use costs “$1.95, the same as a book.”  The authors and publishers can be excused for being on the wrong side of history back then, but by now, there's no reason to whine. Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 and created the next revolution-- book industry 2.0.

McLuhan, still not sure of his time allowance, got to point #4 quickly and made a mind blowing statement: “Let me tell you a simple principle that you can use in your business. When a fast form goes around a slow form, the slow one collapses.”

4)  “When a fast form goes around a slow form, the slow one collapses. (13:00 min)

He repeated the phrase two times, for emphasis: “A speed up in any part of your enterprises will dissolve and destroy the slower parts of your enterprise. Put a fast spin rim around a slow one and the slow one disintegrates.”

McLuhan’s fast spin rim phrase has profound implications for society under satellite conditions. Our recent history races forward by faster forms encircling and dominating slow forms. McLuhan said television went around the movies and transformed movies forever after. He calls the satellite ring above the earth a fast moving rim capable of destroying the earth, or at the very least transforming the earth to garbage, or a new set of clothes:

"Put a satellite ring around the planet, and all arrangements around the planet disintegrate. It becomes garbage. Garbage is clothing." (Author’s Luncheon 1966)

McLuhan employes colorful language declaring the world garbage, and refers to the new environment as echo land.  The satellite ring around the planet turned the globe to a programmed environment. The earth itself became an art form, McLuhan stated. Nature existed no longer. Ecology arose. The photograph of a spinning globe, the Blue Marble, taken from a space capsule forever changed man’s understanding of the earth, rather than learn about space, we learned about ourselves.

McLuhan asked himself what technology might go around television as the dominant electronic medium and hypothesized the hologram might be next. Sadly, McLuhan died in 1980 before personal computers and cellphones entered the  marketplace, though he envisaged this development back in 1965. Check out the statements made by McLuhan gave in New York in May 1965, and a summary of the speech by a New Yorker reporter:

"He  discussed the depth-involving qualities of sunglasses, textured stockings, discotheques, and comic book; reported on the iconic properties of Andy Warhol’s signed soup cans: and predicted a happy day when everyone will have his own portable computer to cope with the dreary business of digesting information. Dr. McLuhan has earned a reputation among the cognoscenti as the world’s first Pop philosopher." (New Yorker  May 15, 1965  p.43)

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 11^th 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 11^th 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 12^th 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.