"WOMAN IN AD:" "Now!" "The dream cars of tomorrow!" "MCLUHAN:" "The huge vortices of energy created by our technologies present us with unfathomable consequences." "MCLUHAN:" "Put a decent man in an aeroplane a few hundred feet above a village and he will kill without compunction, inflict appalling pain and injury on men women and children." "That bomber pilot is really like the person introducing any new technology." "None of these people ever consider what will be the impact or the effect of what they do when they pull that trigger." "We cannot trust our instincts or our natural physical responses to new things." "They will destroy us." "MCLUHAN:" "How are we to get out of the maelstrom created by our own ingenuity?" "Edgar Allen Poe has a story called "The Descent into the Maelstrom"." "Poe imagines the situation in which a sailor, who has gone out..." "MARINER:" "When I was young, my brother and I fish out yonder, beyond the whirl of the maelstrom." "Those cross-currents gave us bountiful fish, until the day the heavens opened and let loose a furious tempest." "The heaving sea swallowed my brother." "And I was swept into the chaos of the maelstrom." "I could only await my eventual plunge into the abyss." "With all hope lost..." "I found myself idly studying the action of the vortex." "Some objects did not fall, but were whirled up to the level of the sea!" "Therein lied my salvation!" "MARINER:" "I tied myself to my old steamer trunk ... and I abandoned my doomed ship." "Thus did I free myself from oblivion!" "MCLUHAN:" "The huge vortices of energy created by our media present us with similar possibilities of evasion, of consequences, of destruction." "By studying the pattern of the effects of this huge vortex of energy that, in which were involved, it may be possible to program a strategy of evasion and survival." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "Marshall McLuhan did learn how to survive in the vortex." "And he wound up just like Poes sailor." "MARINER:" "My rescuers were old mates of mine, and yet they would not believe that my experience had been real." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "McLuhan called his discovery the laws of media." "He said:" "theyre four simple questions that reveal the future of all technology." "But nobody took him seriously." "Some said such prediction impossible, but most just assumed that the future would be bright." "CHORUS OF VOICES:" "(indistinguishable)" "PHILLIP MARCHAND:" "I believe that he always felt that there was some underlying order and coherence in the universe." "ROBERT LOGAN:" "No field intimidated him." "Everything he read, he sort of wove it into a picture..." "YOUNG MCLUHAN:" "When I was young, my brother and I fish out yonder, beyond the whirl of the maelstrom." "Those cross-currents gave us bountiful fish, until the day the heavens opened..." "PATRICK WATSON:" "What I saw was this great buccaneer of the word, sailing out, looking for islands where the spray was thrown up by an encounter of a hard word and a soft word." "Thats why I think of him as a poet." "As a creator of metaphor, who takes all those chances, as a poet does." "ROBERT LOGAN:" "His joy was to relate things that other people thought were unrelated." "YOUNG MCLUHAN:" "All of life, mental, physical, spiritual, is governed by laws still largely unknown to human beings." "I am going to work out some of the great laws." "I believe that it would be the greatest step in philosophy if a hundred or so of these laws were to be carefully worked out and studied." "MCLUHAN:" "The laws of the media are observations on the operations and effects of human artefacts on man and society." "They are at least a hope that we can reduce this confusion to some sort of order." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "The first question to ask of any technology, any tool, is:" "What will this thing enhance?" "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "How will it extend you, make you bigger, lift you up?" "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "You begin with so little to help you survive, just your wits, and your senses." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "Your eyes collecting detail" "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "Your ears sweeping a sphere." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "Your nose riding the wind" "HUNTER:" "1 Were in a good position, the winds coming at us." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "Every tool extends your body, senses or mind." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "Extends, say, your fingernails" "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "Or your skin" "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "The things you make, they mimic you" "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "Theyre like you, but a you thats enhanced" "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "Containers extend your arms" "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "The chair extends your bum and spine..." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "Tools change the way you touch and are touched" "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "Its all translation." "Its a loop" "MCLUHAN:" "All of mans artefacts of language, of laws, of ideas, hypotheses, tools, clothing, computers, all of these are extensions of our physical bodies." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "But they all extend, they all translate, in their own particular way." "TEACHER:" "The letter V" "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "The alphabet, "mother of western invention", extends the eye." "TEACHER:" "A is for" "CHILDREN:" "Armadillo!" "TEACHER:" "D is for" "CHILDREN:" "Dolphin!" "TEACHER:" "E is for" "CHILDREN:" "Elephant!" "CHILD 1:" "Ca, Da, Ee, Fe, Ge..." "MCLUHAN:" "The phonetic alphabet has a very peculiar set of characteristics." "It is made up of phonemes, that is, bits that are meaningless." "CHILD 2:" "I found it!" "MCLUHAN:" "The 26 letters of our alphabet have no meaning at all." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "C is for caterpillar." "Cuh ah ta eh rrr pillar" "CHILDREN:" "(singing. overlapping) A, B, C,D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U V, W, X, Y and Z. Now I know my ABCs, next time wont you sing with me?" "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "Your eye follows from letter to letter, word to word, line to line." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "The printing press extends the alphabet" "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "Letter by letter;" "Word by word;" "Page by page;" "Book by book by book;" "Until your eye can fly through space and time across the known universe;" "Line by line" "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "Its translation." "Its a loop." "You shape your tools in your own image and, in their turn, they shape you." "Ssshh..." "Quiet in the library." "Its not a hockey rink!" "MCLUHAN:" "One of the strange implications of the phonetic alphabet is private identity." "Before literacy, there had only been the tribal group." "MCLUHAN:" "Literacy marched steadily in the direction of fragmenting and segmenting and classifying data, turning men into specialists who pursued individual subjects with individual themes and goals, quite without relation to one another." "MCLUHAN:" "People who are subjected to the arrangement of language, visually, in lines, highly sequential, and precise and rigid, develop the habits of arranging their lives, arranging their whole social existence in ways which are very closely geared to these forms." "Theyre not especially aware of this." "MCLUHAN:" "The visual world has the properties of being a sort of continuous and connected, homogeneous, rational, logical, connected, private, individualistic, civilized world." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "The things you make, they mimic you." "Though, frankly, its sometimes hard to see the resemblance." "MCLUHAN:" "And this is the old myth of Narcissus." "SALESMAN:" "All our Jaguars come with tradition behind them." "MCLUHAN:" "The word Narcissus means narcosis, numbed, drugged." "And Narcissus was drugged into thinking that image outside himself was somebody else." "Narcissus did not fall in love with his own image, he thought it was somebody else." "SALESMAN:" "Simply, simply amazing." "MCLUHAN:" "And the same with us." "In our technological gadgetry, gimmickry and so on, we dont think that it is merely a part of our own physical organism extended out there, were like Narcissus, completely numb." "SALESMAN:" "When you take one out for a drive, which you will do momentarily, then you will see why Jaguar will be your next purchase." "MCLUHAN:" "Now when we put out a new part of ourselves, extend a new part of ourselves by technology to the outer environment, we protect ourselves by numbing that area." "The more I looked at this, the the more difficulty I had in explaining why people ignored it." "PHILLIP MARCHAND:" "He was somebody who realized early on that something that made life bearable was our ability to observe and enjoy this incredibly rich world that we live in." "DERECK DE KERCKHOVE:" "His mother reading to him ever day, most of English literature must have helped." "A love for language, a love for ideas." "CORINNE MCLUHAN:" "I think she had every influence." "PHILLIP MARCHAND:" "His mother was an elocutionist." "She used to go on tours of Canada, reciting poems, doing dramatic monologues, and so on." "CORINNE MCLUHAN:" "Ive always said she was the most intelligent woman Ive ever met, and the most frustrated, because there was no outlet for her considerable talents." "His father was not a literary man." "Perfectly charming, gallant." "PHILLIP MARCHAND:" "His dad, I think, was very much, an amateur philosopher." "He had a very high-minded view of life, where you were always trying to grapple with the higher things, metaphysics and the Bible." "He delivered a talk to the local church on a topic called "The Higher Plane" ." "PHILLIP MARCHAND:" "McLuhan was always kind of a serious young kid." "He was encouraged to and eagerly memorized long passages from poets." "I think for the young Marshall, literature was the higher plane." "CORINNE MCLUHAN:" "Now, he went to Cambridge after he already had a BA and an MA from Manitoba." "He felt that a BA from Cambridge was far superior to an MA from Manitoba." "PATRICIA BRUCKMANN:" "If you can imagine the excitement that Cambridge must have been." "Now thats where he was the very brilliant young man, doing utterly good stuff." "ERIC MCLUHAN:" "All of my fathers work had its genesis really, in this PhD." "Ostensibly he was studying Thomas Nashe, an Elizabethan satirist." "PATRICIA BRUCKMANN:" "So the first thing Marshall did was that he realized that if he wanted to talk about the rhetoric of Nashe he had to go back and find out everything, from the beginning." "We all should do it that way, you read one text and that gives you a set of questions, "Where did this come from and what did it mean?" And you have to keep going back and back and back." "ERIC MCLUHAN:" "Looking back at the entire tradition took him back to Greece and Rome, and the study of the trivium." "The ancient intellectual establishment, which hadnt been done before." "PHILLIP MARCHAND:" "And the trivium was basically logic, rhetoric and grammar." "Grammar was the study of language." "Rhetoric was how to present yourself, your ideas, your insights." "And of course, Logic was logic." "PHILLIP MARCHAND:" "McLuhan came to believe that the history of culture was the history of the ongoing struggle between these three alternate ways of looking at things." "McLuhan was fascinated by grammar and rhetoric." "ERIC MCLUHAN:" "Grammarians werent just people interested in things like parts of speech, and syntax and punctuation." "But they looked at the world as a book." "So, he trained himself as a grammarian, right there." "PHILLIP MARCHAND:" "Its almost as if he shared the medieval notion of the two books." "One book was the, the written book, the Bible, the other was the book of the universe, and you could also read that book." "Because the creator of both books had invested them with that coherence." "And of course, when he became Catholic, that was solidified." "PHILLIP MARCHAND:" "The great philosopher of Catholicism, Thomas Aquinas says faith is consistent with reason." "ERIC MCLUHAN:" "He found in Aquinas a sort of a kindred spirit, another grammarian." "A man who took, all knowledge, all learning as his province." "PHILLIP MARCHAND:" "Thomas Aquinas says trust the authority of the senses." "And then theres the almost medieval notion of the five senses as working together in a kind of workshop, to re create reality in the mind of the individual." "So McLuhan always believed that if you really listened, and saw and felt, you could perceive correctly." "MCLUHAN:" "A catholic has some assurance that all parts of the world will bear inspection." "That theyre all good." "CORINNE MCLUHAN:" "He was an intensely religious person." "It was his very being." "He was an intellectual." "I recognized that at once." "During our courtship, the poetry Marshall read was, to me, difficult and devious, maybe Pound, maybe Elliot." "And the poetry I read was romantic poetry." "And we climbed mountains together." "Spouted poetry off to each other." "I didnt have a chance." "I mean, romance, wow!" "CORINNE MCLUHAN:" "We got married in 1939, he was sure there wasnt going to be any war." "Well, I learned later he hadnt looked in the newspapers or listened to any of the broadcasts." "CORINNE MCLUHAN:" "I often said that Marshalls priorities." "First, his faith." "His second priority was his intellectual life." "And then I often said that I ran a third place in the race." "CORINNE MCLUHAN:" "He did much of his work lying down on the couch, with the doors closed." "Children couldnt come in." "Eric as a little boy, he was in grammar school, I remember once his coming in and saying "Dad, why dont you get a job?"" "CORINNE MCLUHAN:" "He worked all the time, which he couldnt help." "It was he, day and night getting abstracted, even in company." "The old brain was too active, I think." "MCLUHAN:" "My first teaching job was at the University of Wisconsin in Madison." "And, when I got up to face freshman classes, I realized I was in a strange country and that I had to learn a good deal about it from the very ground up." "FRANK ZINGRONE:" "I think at a certain point in time, he realized that he was sort of a bit of a dweeb, when it came to, relating to North American young people." "He was trying to teach literature to students in the States when he was a young assistant professor and they dont understand what hes talking about." "And he didnt want to fail in that way." "PHILLIP MARCHAND:" "He thought that the way to get their attention was to show them things that they thought they knew." "Advertising." "And show them that they didnt know it." "That they didnt pay attention to it." "And if they did pay attention to it, that theyd realize that their brains were being massaged." "And they were oblivious to this environment, even at the same time as they were sort of robotically conditioned by the environment." "MCLUHAN:" "Advertising is a vast, military operation openly and brashly intended to conquer the human spirit." "The advertiser is a manipulator, yes." "He plays around with human beings as if they were his pigment." "He smears us." "Students and historians of the future will pour over advertising world with a sort of intensity which we should have long ago directed to it." "PATRICIA BRUCKMANN:" "He calls it, yeah, "The Mechanical Bride" so that something that should be natural is no longer natural." "Its being created by the new language industry." "ROBERT FULFORD:" "What kind of a world would you rather live in?" "MCLUHAN:" "Id rather be in any period at all, as long as people are going to leave it alone for a while." "Just let go!" "Just leave it." "I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand whats happening." "Because I dont chose to just sit and let the juggernaut roll over me." "Now, this uh, many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, then youre in favour of it." "Well, the exact opposite is true in my case, anything I talk about is almost certain to be something that I am resolutely against." "And it seems to me that the best way of opposing it is to understand it and then you know where to turn off the button." "PATRICIA BRUCKMANN:" "That, I think is the cornerstone of Marshalls fascination with modern arts and communication." "You had to figure out how these things were working." "Remember at the beginning of "The Mechanical Bride" when he says about Poes sailor?" "MCLUHAN:" "Edgar Allen Poe has a story called "The Descent into the Maelstrom"" "PATRICIA BRUCKMANN:" "The story itself is central to this thought." "GERALD OGRADY What McLuhan saw in the Poe story was that it was a place where youre always moving because thats what the environment does, youre always in a process." "And, since youre being massaged, and you dont even realize how youre being massaged, you cant step back, but by being with it, you realize its structure or its pattern." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "The second question is:" "What will this tool obsolesce?" "What normal ways are bound to fade in light of your new invention?" "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "Old tools may hang around but if you want to get the job done youre gonna want the latest thing..." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "And then, before you know it, You cant seem to find a decent buggy whip or blacksmith." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "Something ventured, something lost." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "Your new silver wheels lend power to your feet and numb the rest of your body." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "Your fields and farms must retreat from the rising tide of the city." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "You do away with the ancient rhythms of day and night every time you flick on an electric light." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "You reshape the space all around you." "New figures appear, new connections are made, a new world arises out of the old." "MCLUHAN:" "With the kinds of power and energy now available, it is possible to create environments anywhere overnight just by laying on electric lighting." "MCLUHAN:" "These are environments that alter all human affairs, all human relationships in any part of the world." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "Do you still recall the mystery of the dark?" "Can you still follow the light of the moon?" "MCLUHAN:" "Electric media obsolesce the visual, the connected, the logical, the rational." "MCLUHAN:" "What the child encounters in the present school, is carefully bureaucratised arrangement of seats, class schedules and subject matters, all separated from one another." "Theyre subjected to a curriculum of classified information, which they are expected to record, memorize, regurgitate." "In classified patterns." "He comes in to that classroom from a prolonged experience of integral participation in a highly organized global situation." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "The normal ways fade before the new." "You shape your tools they shape you." "MCLUHAN:" "What we have done in our time with our electrical technology is put our nervous system outside ourselves." "MCLUHAN:" "When you extend, by technology your own inner central nervous system, you put your nervous system outside, we put the nervous system outside, and we put it around ourselves globally." "We stuff our physical being inside the nervous system." "MCLUHAN:" "This means that every private operator can own a hunk of your central nervous system as if it were a wheel or a box or a piece of land." "MCLUHAN:" "And he can stand on your nose, your eyes, your nerves, he can exploit and move every part of your inner being by these means." "No Elizabethan had any such resources." "MCLUHAN:" "This is a totally new information environment, of which humanity has never had any experience whatever." "MCLUHAN:" "Now, you see, we have a media that stress all the senses and we have no education to cope with the media at all." "CORINNE MCLUHAN:" "He was a literary man, primarily." "His interest in communications was secondary." "Once he got involved with communications, he got fascinated by it." "It was like the tentacles spreading out in all directions." "And he saw the interrelationship of everything." "He made the Understanding Media group, and he had representatives from the different disciplines." "PATRICIA BRUCKMANN:" "He was interested in other disciplines." "Now that kind of thing has become terribly fashionable now, but it wasnt fashionable then." "EDMUND CARPENTER:" "We met most days in the museum cafeteria." "People would be there and a phrase would come out and boom, it would be taken and seized by everyone." "Nobody took anybody elses ideas, we just took every idea." "And used them, misused them, played with them." "Pretty much the way the surrealists would do in art." "McLuhan was the absolute centre of a group of people doing that." "PHILLIP MARCHAND:" "All of it really crystallizes in the seven or eight issues of Explorations that McLuhan and his friend, the anthropologist Ted Carpenter put out." "GERALD OGRADY He was writing about Linus Pauling in chemistry, Werner Heisenberg in physics, Cervantes, jazz music, J.Z. Young in biology and quoting every scholarly book on every subject." "PHILLIP MARCHAND:" "It is in those articles, he finally, I think articulates fully that all technologies are languages." "Language itself is the supreme technology that almost gives you the entrée to all the other disciplines and languages and technologies." "FRANK ZINGRONE:" "The people in those disciplines thought he was playing fast and loose, because he had no credentials in any of those areas." "MCLUHAN:" "Any specialist is going to see to it that his specialty is protected against any invasion from any quarter. (chuckles) Theyve got a very good thing." "Theyve taken a long time to acquire this specialist skill and they dont see why they should yield one inch to people with different methods." "PHILLIP MARCHAND:" "Well, McLuhan started to make an impact with the Gutenberg Galaxy, which was in 1962." "And then Understanding Media came along a couple of years later." "And that led to what they subsequently called the McLuhan explosion." "MCLUHAN:" "The forms of entertainment that work best on television are ones which emit a great deal of casualness in which people can be introduced and dialogued with in the presence of the camera at all sorts of levels of their lives." "You capture them at all sorts of strange and offbeat moments of their existence." "MCLUHAN:" "Instead of going out and buying a packaged book, of which there have been 5, 000 copies printed, you will go to the telephone, describe your interests, your needs, your problems, and they at once Xerox with the help of computers from the libraries of the world, all the latest material just for you personally." "Not as something to be put out on the bookshelf." "They send you the package as a direct personal service." "This is where were headed under electronic information conditions." "PHILLIP MARCHAND:" "And then of course, theres a whole other thing that happened in the business world." "ANNOUNCER 1:" "Thompson House." "From here, Roy Thompson operates radio and television stations, magazines, newspapers and book companies in 20 countries." "The king of communications is told that he should meet the philosopher of communications." "The controversial Marshall McLuhan." "ROY THOMPSON:" "The dominant medium of communication of any age alters the way people think, feel, act, and react." "Television is thus returning the viewers to the picture thinking of primitive men." "Of course, I think this is all pie in the sky myself." "ANNOUNCER 1:" "Dr. McLuhan arrives." "LEWIS LAPHAM:" "Some of the critics of McLuhan made fun of McLuhan because they accused him of being a bringer of doom and they thought they were impervious to doom." "MCLUHAN:" "This is a talk of the literate man." "A literate man is all for absorbing things." "The new sort of electric man doesnt want to absorb things." "ROY THOMPSON:" "You mean that in the future, people are not going to be as literate?" "MCLUHAN:" "Oh yes, literacy is on the skids." "Oh yes." "ROY THOMPSON:" "Now I understand why you got the reputation." "I see." "Youre a shocker isnt he?" "PATRICK WATSON:" "Our own Marshall McLuhan has been labelled a poet, a philosopher, a prophet." "Life Magazine called him the oracle of the electric age." "His critics are almost as lively as his admirers." "They call him a gadfly, spellbinder, a word merchant." "But almost everyone agrees, no one can make sense out of more than 10 percent of what McLuhan has to say." "INTERVIEWER 2:" "What kind of message are you trying to get across?" "MCLUHAN:" "The kinds that are indicated in what Ive already said." "Just anything that creates a state of awareness and makes life more exciting and wide awake, rather." "The title "Finnegans Wake", Joyces book, is one that fascinates me and has much to do with whats going on in our time." "Finn again back to the old tribal cycle, thats whats happening in the electric age, were becoming involved in each other again, in a tribal ways." "Finn, the Finn cycle, Finn again." "But this time, wide awake." "Finnegans Wake!" "INTERVIEWER 3:" "Yet man in society must make some decisions about the rights and wrongs of certain issues." "Only in this way can a society function without anarchy." "McLuhan" "MCLUHAN:" "I thought we had achieved anarchy very completely long ago." "I didnt realize that it was something that remained to be done." "And um, I think were going further in every minute." "Its like the fish in the water." "We dont know who discovered water, but we know it wasnt a fish." "A pervasive medium, a pervasive environment, is always beyond perception." "ANNOUNCER 3:" "Tonight from London, the Marshall McLuhan Golden Probe show!" "PHILLIP MARCHAND:" "The journalists did him a service in the sense that they attempted to present to a very wide audience what McLuhan was all about." "The journalists puffed McLuhan because a journalist, if hes writing about something has to say this is worthwhile." "But on the other hand, sometimes they didnt understand him and sometimes they aroused the resentment amongst the intellectual class that this guy, McLuhan is a charlatan who was suckering media and journalists and business and trying to make big bucks out of it." "ANNOUNCER 3:" "Stand by for a McLuhan test probe." "FRANK ZINGRONE:" "A lot of people were very worried about him and his effect because he was so much a part of the modern world, so un-professorial, in the way in which he flipped around with these media people." "They actually at one point decided to circulate a petition to have him removed from the university." "ROBERT LOGAN:" "Academics are a very mean group of people." "Very critical." "Its mostly out of jealousy." "And they had a lot to be jealous about." "GERALD OGRADY It then became, kind of a game." "People would go to their area of expertise and find one or two factual errors, and others, and things that he had been brought down." "LISS JEFFREY:" "Then of course, there is the matter that hes writing about a subject outside the bounds of proper scholarship." "He was very excited about looking at this, whereas others often saw it as the decline of Western civilization." "CORINNE MCLUHAN:" "I was doing my best to get Marshall interested in the offers he had had from universities in the States." "We went to see Claude Bissell, president of the U of T. And Claude said "All right, Marshall, what would you think about having your own building, your own Coach house?" Marshall was in 7th heaven." "PATRICK WATSON:" "That was the demonstration that he had managed to ride up over all the opposition at the university." "Without accommodating to it, to become recognized by the establishment." "HOST 1:" "Tonight in Columbian Presbyterian Medical Centre in New York City, Marshall McLuhan is recovering from protracted surgery yesterday to remove a growth on the cranium, not directly touching the brain." "CORINNE MCLUHAN:" "He lost 5 years of memory." "That was a big blow to Marshall." "He jumped right back into teaching, and started a new book, and finished three." "Im sure feeling that he had to justify himself." "That he was still bright." "After his operation, Marshall began to be particularly interested in the bi-cameral effects of the right and left hemispheres of the brain." "GERALD OGRADY He was always interested in the senses." "For him the environment was everything and its interaction with the mind." "So, he was involved in what now is known as physiology and cognitive studies." "Thirty years before anyone heard of it." "ROBERT LOGAN:" "The left side of the brain was linear and sequential." "And the right side of the brain was holistic." "FRANK ZINGRONE:" "Marshall saw that there was an internal truth there, in the way in which the mind is, in effect split and is really two minds, trying to achieve balance." "MCLUHAN:" "We are now in a world which pushes the right hemisphere way up, because its an all-at-once world." "The right hemisphere is an all-at-once, simultaneous world." "So, the right hemisphere, by pushing up into dominance is making the old left hemisphere world, which is our educational establishment, our legal establishment, make it look very foolish." "MARINER:" "Some objects did not fall, but were whirled up to the level of the sea!" "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "The third question is:" "What will this tool retrieve from all the things youve lost?" "HUNTER 2:" "The most memorable trip Ive ever been on was when I went hunting by myself for the first time." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "Speech retrieves old adventures, reshaped as stories, much more tidy, than they ever were when lived." "HUNTER:" "3 This guy decides hes going to, hes going to have a crap in the bush and gets up and goes behind the trees, sort of thing, and puts his rifle there beside him and hes down there having an crap sort of thing, and then this big buck jumps in front of him, and he was just about ready to wipe his butt, so he goes like that, he sees that buck and he goes "Oh, shit!" (Laughter)" "ASTRONOMER:" "Over here we have Taurus, the Bull." "The head of the bull is actually an open cluster of stars, shaped like a V. Most of the constellations have Greek names." "The Greeks used the stars to navigate." "They studied their positions and came up with ways to remember where the stars were." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "The things you used, to just get by, come back to you as art; to help you to survive the endless stretching of your heart" "MCLUHAN:" "In the Renaissance, the image they saw very vividly in the rear-view mirror was a medieval one." "What the middle ages saw in their rear-view mirror, what they thought was the present was Ancient Rome." "What the Industrial 19th century saw in the rear view mirror was the Renaissance." "What we see in the rear-view mirror is the 19th century." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "The more you get, the faster you go, the more you strive to retrieve a time before any time youve ever known." "In the 19th century no one thought to rebuild outpost villages simply for their charm." "MCLUHAN:" "The happy tendency of technological innovation tends to tidy up the old culture, whatever it happens to be, into a work of art." "MCLUHAN:" "If you really are curious about the future, just study the present." "Because what we ordinarily see in any present is really what appears in the rear-view mirror." "What we ordinarily think of as the present is really the past." "MCLUHAN:" "Content is always the previous medium and thats all that we can see." "MCLUHAN:" "Modern suburbia lives in Bonanza land." "MCLUHAN:" "It is impossible for man to look straight at the present, he is so terrified by it." "We stand on the stern of the ship, looking at the wake and saying were in very troubled waters." "MCLUHAN:" "And so, revivals on all hands in every phase of life today." "Revivals of clothing, of dances, of music, of shows, of everything." "We live by the revival, it tells us who were are, or were." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "Electric media bring back the village from the distant past, where you knew everything about everybody and news travelled fast." "MCLUHAN:" "Now, this is what I call the global village." "You no longer have to be anywhere in order to do everything." "The same information is available at the same moment from every part of the world." "MCLUHAN:" "The world is now like a continually sounding tribal drum, where everybody gets the message, all the time." "A princess gets married in England and boom, boom, boom go the drums." "We all hear about it." "An earthquake in North Africa, a Hollywood star gets drunk, away go the drums again." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "Electric media retrieve the forest, stirring all around you." "MCLUHAN:" "Electric information comes from all directions at once, and when information comes from all directions simultaneously, you are living in an acoustic world." "The acoustic world has no continuity, no homogeneity, no connections and no stasis, everything is changing." "MCLUHAN:" "Its the same shift that Alice in Wonderland made when she went through the looking glass." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "Electric media retrieve the old dark age of goddesses and monsters" "MCLUHAN:" "Our ancestors lived in a mythic world, because they had none of the literate means of classification." "A myth is a speeded up following of a process." "We live mythically ourselves, so that we understand their myths now for the first time." "MCLUHAN:" "You should know what the stakes are." "The stakes are civilization versus tribalism." "And its a considerable revolution to have been through 2500 years of phonetic literacy, only to encounter the end of that road." "MCLUHAN:" "Pattern recognition in the midst of a huge, overwhelming, destructive force is the way out of the maelstrom." "The huge vortices of energy created by our media present us with similar possibilities of evasion of consequences of destruction." "CORINNE MCLUHAN:" "Marshall was primarily the teacher, a professor, if you will, and the students loved being in his classes." "MCLUHAN:" "Everyone in this room is in costume, except me." "I have on a dress. (Laughter) No, jeans are a costume, they are a tribal costume, and they are an expression of a strong corporate grievance against the establishment (Laughter) Why do you think you wear a hick costume in an affluent business world?" "STUDENT:" "Because they are comfortable." "MCLUHAN:" "No." "Youre a bunch of affluent suburban kids and youre not hicks, but you dress like hicks." "Why?" "NEIL POSTMAN:" "He was the only person, I think Id ever known up to that time who could, in one sentence talk about the Hollywood westerns and Plato and then Elvis Presley and he would connect it." "PHILLIP MARCHAND:" "McLuhan drove a lot of students nuts because they were going to be tested on their knowledge of Blake and Wordsworth." "They werent going to be tested on their knowledge of Batman and Pepsi Cola ads, and yet this is what McLuhan talked about in his class." "LISS JEFFREY:" "Many people describe their key encounter with McLuhan almost as a form of conversion experience." "It is a mystical kind of experience where one moment, you see the world one way, the next moment you see it very differently." "McLuhan made it very clear that the young were among the best investigators of media environments, precisely because, as he put it, they didnt suffer from a hardening of the categories." "DERECK DE KERCKHOVE:" "The atmosphere around here was delightful and it was charged with, with a certain kind of excitement coming from the glamour of it all." "McLuhan really was a glamour person." "GERALD OGRADY Family Circle, the little magazine that you could pick up at the supermarket, I remember it saying hes the most coveted after-dinner guest in America." "FRANK ZINGRONE:" "He was on the most popular show on television at that time which was the "Laugh In"." "And they had, this nerdish character, Henry Gibson, would come out and he would say "Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin?" So, like, 40 million people were suddenly aware of his name." "CORINNE MCLUHAN:" "And the children in the park would be "What are you doin, Marshall McLuhan?"" "NEIL POSTMAN:" "He was going all over the world at that time." "He was world famous, his name was even a word, mcluhanesque." "DERECK DE KERCKHOVE:" "He enjoyed every moment of his, you know, celebrity." "He enjoyed not being bothered by it." "Marshall McLuhan was very casual about things like that." "He was driven by ideas, absolutely, he was not driven by ambition." "CORINNE MCLUHAN:" "Marshall never used the word celebrity." "He was in demand, but a lot of crackpots are in demand." "The effect that Marshall would have wanted to have would have been to make people think." "So they could see the connectedness of everything." "MCLUHAN:" "Television is a serious medium, it is an inner-oriented medium, you are the vanishing point, it goes inside you, you go on an inner trip, it is the prelude, the vestibule to LSD." "PATRICK WATSON:" "A great deal of what he was doing was, quite frankly, throwing things out and seeing what they looked like the next day and how people would react to them." "Many of his pronouncemente, they were not meant to be... they were not analytically structured, they were metaphors and he was convinced that the metaphors were worth wrestling with, but he was not always convinced that they were true." "MCLUHAN:" "You see, all the kings horses and all the kings men couldnt put Humpty Dumpty back together again, because they were bureaucrats." "They werent turned on." "But with electric circuits, Humpty Dumpty goes back together again with a rush." "PHILLIP MARCHAND:" "Most people did not get their understanding of McLuhan from his books." "The books, particularly as the sixties wore on, became less and less coherent, and this is partly because McLuhan was not interested in writing books." "His favourite mode of communication was talking, talking ideas out." "NEIL POSTMAN:" "He wanted to get his ideas out to people, so he did appear on television all the time." "And I think that it cost him." "MCLUHAN:" "When you see that juice being poured out onto spaghetti, that is good TV, glug, glug, glug." "That is great TV." "WARNER TROYER:" "Im going to read the book again." "I still wont understand it." "MCLUHAN:" "TV itself is a kind of happening." "Technically." "And it tends to involve people in its own vortex." "The media themselves can now create events that are so much bigger than people, so much bigger than the audience, that it really is a new mythic form." "The coverage of the Vietnam war is done by more people than who are actually fighting in Vietnam." "The numbers of people covering Vietnam business around the world, and participating in it through newscasts, the numbers are many many millions." "And so, the war then becomes a fiction, a colossal fiction." "PETER GZOWSKY:" "The user of electronic services is largely deprived of his private identity." "MCLUHAN:" "And his physical body. (Laughter) Remember the Cheshire cat that came on smiling, minus his body?" "PETER GZOWSKY:" "Yes." "MCLUHAN:" "That is us." "PETER GZOWSKY:" "Really?" "MCLUHAN:" "That is us, just like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland." "MCLUHAN:" "Its people who are sent, not the message." "BARBARA WALTERS:" "I must say, you do send me." "I find whenever youre on, we talk faster, and we do..." "HUGH DOWNS:" "And think about it for hours afterwards." "MCLUHAN:" "Its been fun!" "BARBARA WALTERS:" "Do you know whats going on in some great American homes?" "Let me tell you, Sears best interior latex paint." "PATRICIA BRUCKMANN:" "It must be hard to be the almighty totem pole." "I mean, what do you do if youre become the media guru, but youre aware that youre being asked to give sound bites and God knows what else." "And how do you get out of it, if the media is in fact what you are talking about?" "LISS JEFFREY:" "Its one of the most painful parts of understanding McLuhan, is when you read his letters, beginning in the early 70s, and he realizes his message has not gotten through." "Nobodys really listening." "TOM SNYDER:" "What do you think is the most I want to say effective, but thats not the right word." "Im talking about television here." "Uh, what has the greatest impact on an audience?" "MCLUHAN:" "From?" "TV programming?" "TOM SNYDER:" "Is television best when it covers an event, like the space shot, or the Olympics, or a baseball game?" "Is it best when it tries to entertain with comedies..." "PHILLIP MARCHAND:" "I am sure that McLuhan was not satisfied that hed been understood towards the end of his life." "My own feeling is that he felt that people had not bothered to understand." "I think that he felt keenly that his academic colleagues were never ready to give him a hearing or to respect him." "PHILLIP MARCHAND:" "He became involved in a club called the Best Club, at the University of Toronto." "And this Best Club consisted of people who were heads of their own centres." "McLuhan enjoyed these get togethers." "This was obviously a select group of academics." "But amongst themselves, they, themselves, these people, could not come to a conclusion as to whether McLuhan was a really great thinker or a charlatan." "That question hung over McLuhan until the very end." "LISS JEFFREY:" "By 1974, a series of works have appeared, saying in effect, that either McLuhan was wrong, or that McLuhan should not be taken seriously because he has a hidden agenda, whether as a Roman Catholic, or as a conservative in terms of his values." "The chief charge against McLuhan was simply to say "Hes a technological determinist!" "What he says is the machines make the rules" ." "LISS JEFFREY:" "mcluhans enduring phrase is "Nothing is inevitable provided were prepared to pay attention." And he never gave up, to the end of his life." "With Laws of Media, McLuhan was attempting to advance a new science." "DERECK DE KERCKHOVE:" "Marshall is a tool-maker." "He likes tools." "He wants to give you tools." "His probes have been very simple up until now." "Suddenly, he comes up with his grand unified theory." "ERIC MCLUHAN:" "I started working with my father in the middle 60s." "Ten years down the line, 1974 the publisher of Understanding Media had asked for a revision, so we started there, and we ended up with this project called the Laws of Media." "ERIC MCLUHAN:" "We were looking for universal laws, and we found only four that everything does." "These four questions ask you to look at what are the ripple effects." "What other areas are effected?" "Irrespective of the content." "And you begin to realize, media are like languages." "That is, they are far more powerful than anything they are used to say." "The idea that media and innovations and so on are human utterances with the properties of languages this is new." "It is also extremely ancient." "The grammarian used language as a metaphor, as a way of understanding the universe." "He read the heavens as a text, he read the Earth as a text." "He tried to discover laws." "And our laws of media are a new foray into that very ancient way of understanding." "MCLUHAN:" "The laws of the media are quite simply this:" "That every medium exaggerates some function." "Spectacles exaggerate or enlarge or enhance the visual function." "They obsolesce another function." "They retrieve a much older function." "And they flip into the opposite form." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "The last question is this:" "How will your tool reverse on you when its pushed to its outer limit?" "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "The speed and freedom of your automobile starts to reverse the minute you leave the commercial." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "Too much of anything, however sweet, will always bring the opposite of whatever you thought you were getting." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "Books, all those bricks in the castle of knowledge, reverse into bestsellers that crush all the rest." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "Pushed far enough, one becomes many; many become one." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "So it goes, over and over." "Even the global village is coded, in the end, to reverse." "MCLUHAN:" "Do you know what the satellite does to you?" "As an environment, when it goes around the planet?" "Its a proscenium arch." "It turns the planet into a stage, makes you want to be an actor." "REPORTER:" "Okay, Ill give you Ill give you..." "LOCATION RECORDIST:" "Yo yo yo yo." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "You shape your tools and they shape you." "Its a loop." "You start out a consumer and you wind up consumed." "REPORTER:" "Can we get your reaction to whats happened?" "The tragedy next door?" "WOMAN:" "Its terrible, its so horrible." "I cannot even give it a name, you know?" "What kind of tragedy is this?" "How could you kill your own kids?" "I dont know how she did that and why she did that." "MCLUHAN:" "When youre on the phone or on the air, you dont have a physical body, youre just an image." "MCLUHAN:" "A disembodied image." "A disembodied intelligence, like an angel." "MCLUHAN:" "Any electric environment has the major characteristics of TV." "That is, the characteristics of total involvement." "MCLUHAN:" "When everybody becomes totally involved in everybody, how is one to establish identity?" "Quest for identity is a central aspect of the electric age." "MCLUHAN:" "Violence is the only method by which people have ever learned to assert or define identity." "MCLUHAN:" "Terrorists, hijackers, these are people minus identity." "They are determined to make it somehow, to get coverage." "To get noticed." "MCLUHAN:" "It is simply fantastic the unconsciousness of our western world, with regard to the forces that we release upon it." "MCLUHAN:" "Now, the laws of the media, they are at least a hope that we can reduce this confusion to some sort of order." "LISS JEFFREY:" "By the time McLuhan formulated the laws of media, he had effectively lost his audience." "His audience had moved on." "MCLUHAN:" "Since these forms represents really huge extensions of our own bodies, and our own nervous systems, we need a kind of ecology or equilibrium, a kind of balance of all these services." "CORINNE MCLUHAN:" "It seems rather wicked to me, thinking back about Marshalls stroke, that a man who lived by his brains and his intellectual life should be so stricken." "You know, its pretty cruel to be in Marshalls state." "Not being about to speak or read or write." "And he was in that state for 15 months." "EDMUND CARPENTER:" "Marshall spent the last part of his life with us on Long Island." "And Marshall, at that time, couldnt speak." "All he could say was:" ""Boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy." But he understood, no question, he understood." "So we were confining ourselves to telling jokes and he was laughing at each one and so on an so forth." "Then Marshall wanted to speak, and his hands clenched like that, and he stood up, and hed just screamed." "And then he got embarrassed, he smiled, and laughed and went on down to walk along the beach." "It must have been hell." "ROBERT LOGAN:" "The university poured salt on his wounds by closing down his centre." "CORINNE MCLUHAN:" "We came down one morning, to the centre and somebody had, helter skelter put all his papers and things in a big pile to take them out to the trash." "PHILLIP MARCHAND:" "McLuhan just broke down." "This was his life." "And he started to weep." "So that was very sad." "But it did epitomize that his work was not truly respected." "EDMUND CARPENTER:" "He died not long after that." "EDMUND CARPENTER:" "You know theres so many things, I think..." "Oh, if some of these ideas had been accepted, not twisted around, not rejected or ignored..." "CORINNE MCLUHAN:" "Theres a whole generation that who scarcely knew his name, much less his work." "Ive talked to not just students, but young people, "Marshall McLuhan?" "Well who is that?"" "NEIL POSTMAN:" "Its almost impossible to go to a communications conference, any place in the country, and not hear someone say something that they never would have thought of, if not for Marshall McLuhan but they dont know that." "EDMUND CARPENTER:" "I think theres a possibility now that some of these ideas may come back." "GERALD OGRADY He was always interested in truth, and looking at how the world really looked, not how we happen to see it." "Very courageous." "Yeah." "LEWIS LAPHAM:" "You can always go back to him and find things." "And different people will take different things away from the oracle." "ERIC MCLUHAN:" "We have now, at our fingertips, the beginnings of a science of media ecology." "But it means that we have to take charge of these things, to decide not to do things as well as to just to go ahead and do them." "However, this I think is, at least, part of the legacy of Marshall McLuhan." "He left us with the means of control." "Not just the means of understanding." "CORINNE MCLUHAN:" "And he was very much, very far ahead of his time." "Hes very applicable now." "And its a mystery to me how the revival began unless, perhaps people needed some new explanation for old things." "Its a mystery to me, and Im very pleased because Marshall does have the answers, to most of the problems." "Not practical answers, but the theoretic answers." "MCLUHAN:" "The huge vortices of energy created by our technologies present us with possibilities of evasion of destruction." "By studying the pattern of the effects of this huge vortex of energy that, in which were involved, it may be possible to program a strategy of evasion and survival." "LAURIE ANDERSON:" "He said:" "The laws of media, they come in hope." "But they only work as questions:" "What will you gain?" "What will you lose?" "What will return, from an ancient time?" "And what will come, of this thing you create, if you let it go too far?" "Theres no order to the laws of media, all these effects are happening all the time." "The trick is to recognize the pattern before it is complete." "MCLUHAN:" "Kierkegaard is a man of great relevance for this time." "A man of the inner trip, the inner dialogue, the inner encounter." "He has a wonderful quote:" ""Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.""