The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
Kenneth
E. Boulding
The Medium and the Message *
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science
31 (2), May 1965, 268-273.
If, as Marshall McLuhan
repeats almost to the point of being repetitious, the medium is the message,
there is really no way of reviewing these two extraordinary books in a medium
as linear, visual, and non-tactile as print. One might use a book as a weapon, for, as McLuhan understands very well, a weapon is also a medium
and a message (Understanding Media,
chap. 32), in which case one would simply throw the book at the
reader. When I took my degree at Oxford
I was literally struck by the fact that the Vice Chancellor, in conferring the
degree, hit the four kneeling candidates before him solemnly on the head with a
large Bible: “In nomine Patris
(bang!) et Filii (bang!) et Spiritus (bang!) Sancti (bang!)” Reading
these books is a rather similar experience. One is tempted to put the whole review into
the form of a comic strip with balloons simply saying “Pow!,” “Zowie!,” and so on. Or
perhaps one could simply abandon the alphabet and write a long line of
asterisks, exclamation points, and question marks, like this: ! * * ! * * * ! !
* * ? ! ° *
It is clear after reading these books that
something which McLuhan will not allow me to call an
explosion but which I am damned if I will call an implosion is going on in
Toronto, beneath the deceptive surface of what is often regarded as a plain and
provincial, even Presbyterian, exterior. The knowledgeable, however, will nod sagely to
each other and murmur a magic password, “Innis.” The late Harold Innis,
whose stature rises as we recede from him, was perhaps the first man to realize
that communication was the key to social phenomena of all kinds. The all-too-select few who have read a
remarkable little magazine called Explorations, which came out of
Toronto some years ago, realized that the Innis
ferment was working mightily. Again, to
vary the medium and to mix the metaphor, the McLuhan
books are the skyrocket that came out of this ferment, and one feels almost
that if one lit them with a match they would soar up into the sky and explode
into a thousand stars.
Let me, however, try to come down to earth
and explain what the books are about. The
Gutenberg Galaxy, in spite of the fact that convention compels it to be
printed as a codex, is obviously designed to be printed on a moebius strip. It
has no real beginning or end, though it ostensibly begins with King Lear and
ends with a significant reference to Finnigan’s
Wake, which also has no beginning or end. It has no chapters, but is divided into about
a hundred sections, each of which is headed by a chapter gloss, which
summarizes but is also an integral part of the section. Each of these is pretty self-contained, and
*
The Gutenberg Galaxy: the Making of Typographic Man. By
Marshall McLuhan. University
of Toronto Press. 1962. Pp. 294.
$5.95.. Understanding Media, the
Extensions of Man. By Marshall McLuhan. McGraw-Hill Book Company. 1964. Pp. 359. $8.75.
268
can be read almost at random in any order. he total effect is
almost literally that of a galaxy or a great garden of jeweled aphorisms. I can perhaps best give the flavour of the book by quoting some of these, almost at
random. For instance, page 18, “The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet
translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world”;
22, “Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy”; 24, “Does the interiorization of media such as ‘letters’ alter the ratio
among our senses and change mental processes?”; 26, “Civilization gives the
barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the
electronic world”; 31, “The new electronic interdependence recreates the world
in the image of a global village”; 124, “The invention of typography confirmed
and extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the first
uniformly repeatable ‘commodity,’ the first assembly-line, and the first
mass-production”; 199, “Print, in turning the vernaculars into mass media, or
closed systems, created the uniform, centralizing forces of modern
nationalism”; 208, “The uniformity and repeatability of print created the
‘political arithmetic’ of the seventeenth century and the ‘hedonistic calculus’
of the eighteenth”; 239, “Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a
non-literate society”; 251, “Typography cracked the voices of silence.”
Frankly, hopefully “gentle reader,” how do
you review a book like this? Understanding
Media is somewhat more conventional in form, in that it has chapters, and
does seem to have a beginning and an end. The crackling quality of the ideas and of the
style, however, remains, and it is really the same book as The Gutenberg
Galaxy in a slightly more conventional form, and applied more directly to
the problems of the modern world. Even
so, there is a new idea on almost every page, and the sheer density of new
ideas is so great that at the end one has a distinct feeling of having been hit
over the head. The publisher is reported
to have said that nobody would read a book unless at least ninety per cent of
it was familiar, and there is no doubt that a book of this kind, where ninety
per cent of the ideas are unfamiliar to the average reader, is exhausting. It has long been a custom of mine to take
notes of the books I read on the flyleaves at the back, and usually the page or
two which the publisher thoughtfully provides, presumably for this purpose, is
ample. I usually only jot down things
which I think are somewhat new to me or significant. In McLuhan’s case I
find I have not only covered all the flyleaves provided, but my notes have
spilled over onto an assortment of airline menus and hotel stationery,
reflecting the synthesis of two means of communication, the airplane and the
book.
Now, however, comes
the sober and earthy work of appraisal. Is
the Galaxy a firework, exploding into stars and descending as a stick,
or is there something here that shines continuously as part of the structure of
the social universe? What, in other
words, happens to the McLuhan message after it has
gone through the medium of the Boulding nervous
system? I think my conclusion is that
there is a good deal of fireworks, but in the middle of the fireworks there are
some real bright and continuing stars, in the light of which the world will
never be quite the same again. I will
try to summarize in some chapter glosses of my own.
1. A social system is largely structured
by the nature of the media in which communications are made, not by the content
of these communications.
This, I take it, is the central message of
McLuhan, and with this proposition I think I agree
almost 99 per cent. It is the invention
of spoken language that differentiated man from the beasts, and enabled him to
create societies, social systems, and social evolution in the first place. The invention of writing is a major mutation. Without it, urban civilization would have been
inconceivable, even though it is not the only precondition of civilization. Thus, we must have the domestication of plants
and animals, that is, agriculture, before a sufficiently large and stable food
surplus appears with which cities can be fed. Men must be fed before they can write. Once they start to write, however, a whole new
fabric of social life is created, and man becomes conscious of time, and the
social organization extends backward into the past and forward into the future
in a way it could never do in a purely oral society. Societies with alphabets do differ from those
with ideographs, though perhaps McLuhan overdoes
this. All languages are really
ideographic. The alphabet is merely a
crutch towards learning the gestalt patterns of whole words and
sentences, though it is undoubtedly convenient in writing dictionaries and
developing lexicographical orderings. The relationship between literacy and violence
forms a fascinating theme which recurs constantly in McLuhan.
The letters of the alphabet are the
dragon’s teeth from which spring armed men. I am not sure that he is entirely right in
this; I suspect rather that the alphabet and the armed men both spring from a
more remote and fundamental cause, which is the rise of large-scale
organization itself. The apparent peacefulness
of the Neolithic village and the beastly violence of civilization may reflect
merely the ability to organize violence, and even though literacy is part of
the skills of organization, it is by no means the whole.
2. Media can be divided into “hot” media, which
do not involve much participation on the part of the recipient, and “cool”
media, in which the process of communication involves a great deal of
participation on the part of the recipient. The effect of a medium on the structure of
society depends very much on its temperature.
The terminology, I think, is unfortunate,
but the idea is an important one, even if McLuhan
runs it a little into the ground. Print
is a hot medium. It is like a branding
iron, imposing its own pattern on the page, if not on the mind. It is endessly
repeatable; it implies abstraction. It
carries man away from intimate, complex relationships, from gemeinschaft
into gesellschaft, from tribalism
into nationhood, from feudalism into capitalism, from craftsmanship into mass
production, from lore into science. It
builds large-scale organizations because it develops abstract and simple human
relationships, and permits the almost endless multiplication of messages and
patterns. By contrast, speech is a cool
medium, developing dialogue, response, feedback, complex and intricate patterns
of personal relationships, family-centred societies,
a familistic ethic, tribalism, and superstition. McLuhan argues that
by far the most important thing that has happened in the twentieth century is
the development of television, which is a cool medium of communication,
involving a high level of participation on the part of the viewer, mainly, it
would seem, because the television image is so imperfect.
270
It is clear that McLuhan
has an enormously important idea here. On
the other hand, it is not difficult to catch him out in inconsistencies,
especially in his discussion of television, where he seems the least convincing.
From one point of view, surely both
radio and television are as hot media as print, in the sense that they do not
really evoke dialogue or feedback between the recipient and the originator of
messages. On the other hand, one feels
that McLuhan is quite right in pointing out the
enormous contrast between radio and TV. Hitler
was a phenomenon of the brief radio age. On TV he would have been as ridiculous as
McCarthy was. There is no doubt that TV
elected Kennedy, defeated Nixon, and destroyed McCarthy, and that radio was the
secret of the power both of Hitler and of Roosevelt. But this has very little to do with the
hot-cold continuum, as McLuhan describes it. The real difficulty here,
and it is something which is likely to distract attention from the enormous
importance of McLuhan’s message, is that he has tried
to squash into a single dimension properties of media which require at least
three dimensions for their exposition. We have on the one hand the dimension of
involvement of the recipient, which is the one on which McLuhan
concentrates, and this is indeed important. It accounts for a great deal of the different
effects of oral versus written communication, or the difference between
the printed page and the picture, or the difference between Renaissance and
modern painting, or the difference between Mozart and Strindberg. I would like to call this dimension the demandingness of the media. Some media are demanding,
some are undemanding. On this
dimension, I suspect that print is “cooler” than McLuhan
thinks. Print is not imprinted on the
mind the way it is on paper. In order to
effect the transmission from the printed page to the nervous system of the
reader, an enormous amount of involvement is required, and the pattern of the
printed page has to be translated with the aid of an enormous memory bank into
a totally different pattern in the nervous system. After all, there are no letters in the brain. Demandingness here
is perhaps more a function of the context of the medium than the actual
physical form of the medium itself, and McLuhan often
makes the mistake of supposing that it is the physical form of the medium which
is significant rather than its social context.
A second dimension which McLuhan tries to squash into his single continuum is the range
of a medium. This is closely related
to the ability of the medium to develop a system of feedback from the communicatee to the communicator. A conversation, even more a dialogue, is the
medium with the smallest range. It
exists for the most part only at a single point in time and space, even though
there is a time dimension in individual memory. The invention of writing made it possible for
the present to speak to the future, and to hear from the past. It also made it possible for one man to
communicate with people far beyond the range of his voice. Printing merely introduced a quantitative
change in this dimension. It merely had
the effect of amplifying the effect of manuscript. It is significant, I think, that in the age of
print between Gutenberg and Edison, a man could communicate in visual form to
many more people than he could communicate with orally. Electronics changed all this. The phonograph and the tape did for the ear
what writing and printing had done for the eye. It enabled us to hear people from the past and
to speak to people in the future. It
also increased the potential number of people who can hear one man to include
the whole population of the earth. As communication increases in range, however,
it tends to lose in feedback. With
increase in range, dialogue passes into monologue.
A third dimension of media is their
information density. McLuhan hints at this many times, but never quite seems to
spell it out. The concept here is close
to the information theorist’s concept of capacity. The information intake of the human is limited
by the capacity of his sense organs. The
ear has a greatest capacity than the skin, and the eye than the ear. The combination of all the senses has a
greater capacity than any one of them taken singly. The problem is complicated by the fact that
the capacity may not be a simple additive quantity. We are interested, furthermore, not merely in
the amount of information which can be transmitted per unit of time, but in the
total information which can be transmitted and processed during the life of a
system. There is no point in having an
enormous intake of information through the senses for five minutes if it takes
us five days to digest and process the information we have received. It is probably the information-processing
apparatus which is the real bottleneck, not the information-receiving
apparatus. The failure to realize this
occasionally leads McLuhan astray. I suspect, for instance, that he puts too much
stress on “synaesthesia” or the combination of the
senses, and not enough on the fact that it is the processing of information in
the human nervous system which is the really crucial process in the social
system. In this sense it is the
message, not the medium, which is important. The message is not just another medium, as McLuhan is continually saying, for the message consists of
the processing of information into knowledge, and not the mere transmission of
information through a medium.
3. Print created an “explosion” resulting
in the break-up of an old integrated order into individualistic,
differentiated, atomistic, mechanical human particles, producing classical
economics, Protestantism, and the assembly line. Electricity creates an “implosion” which
unifies the nervous systems of all mankind into a single contemporaneous whole,
bringing us back to the tribal village, this time on a world scale.
This exciting theme recurs constantly in McLuhan’s work. It
is one of those great flashes of light which makes the surrounding world seem
rather dim, and it seems almost sacrilegious to ask if this idea is true or can
be tested. Print certainly had a lot to
do with Protestantism and capitalism. On
the other hand it also had a lot to do with the rise of the modern nation, the
development of national literatures, and the break-up of the trans-national
order of the Middle Ages. It is true
that a book (in manuscript) created medieval Europe, and another book created
Islam, and with the coming of print these old unities fragmented. Is this the result of print, however, or is it
simply the result of multiplication? Surely
if Gutenberg had discovered an offset process by which manuscripts themselves
could simply be reproduced cheaply and easily, the effect would have been
exactly the same as the discovery of print. Here again I think we see McLuhan
concentrating on one dimension of a medium to the exclusion of others. Similarly with the electric
implosion. It is certainly true
that the rise of large-scale organization is intimately connected with the
development of the telephone and telegraph and instantaneous com-
272
munication. These
inventions have had an enormous, effect in increasing the range of media, both
in terms of the distance over which dialogue could be conducted, and also in
terms of the number of people to which a single person can speak. On the other hand, I would argue that
electricity in itself has not had much effect on either the demandingness
or the density of media in general. It
has raised some and lowered others. Consequently, I have doubts about the world
village. It is. true, I think, that an
increase in the range of media, whether this is conversations or weapons,
increases the optimum scale of organization, and that we have probably now got
to the point where the optimum scale of political organization is the whole
world. This does not mean, however, that
we are going back to the tribal village. We are going on into something quite new and
strange, and even though this newness and strangeness is highly conditioned by
the nature of the media that produce it, it is by no. means clear that McLuhan has caught the exact relationship. It is perhaps typical of very creative minds
that they hit very large nails not quite on the head.
These criticisms in no way detract from
the enormous importance of these works. They should provide hypotheses for social
sciences to test for a hundred years to come. One would like to see them required reading in
every university. There is indeed in
these days an invisible college, as de Solla Price
calls it, of people who have perceived the crucial role of information
processes in social systems. I am not
sure that I would appoint McLuhan president of this
invisible college, but I would certainly welcome him as its dean.
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