Playboy Classic: Marshall McLuhan

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Marshall McLuhan became famous with his wild, unconventional views about media in the 1960s. What's amaz­ing is how right he was about the future

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n 1961 Marshall McLuhan was unknown to everyone l>ul his Knglish students at the University of Toronto anil a coterie of academic admirers who followed his abstruse articles in small-circulation quarterlies. Of course, that was before he penned a series of paradigm-shifting lxx)ks that changed the way we think about media, technology, communication and even humanity itself. With the publication of McLuhan's The Gutenlxrg Galaxy, Understanding Media and The Medium Is the Massage (the title of which was a play on one of the most popular McLuhanisms. "The medium is the message"), the professor from Canada l>ecame, as the San Francisco Chronicle observed, "the hottest academic property around." Andy Warhol. John l^ennon, V>koOnoand other celebrities made pilgrimages to see him. Tom Wolfe wrote, "Suppose

he is what lie sounds like— tile most imjtortanl thinker since Newton. Darwin. Kreud. Kinstein and Pavlov?" Kven now, 33 years after his death, Mel Aihan's philosophies al>out media and technology are still influential. Mis lx>oks are (aught in colleges, and his thinking informs the technological and media revolutions he predicted. McLuhan envisioned the World Wide Wei) decades liefore its creation. He imagined a time when global conversations would take place in real time'—before the founders of Twitter were even bom. McLuhan wrote, "Societies

have always l>een shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of tlie communication." That message is even more relevant now than when he penned it five decades ago.

At the height of Mcl.uhans |x>pularity, playboy assigned interviewer Eric Norden to visit the author at his home in the wealthy Toronto suburb of Wychwood Park, where he lived with his wife, Corinne. and five of his six children. In March I960 Norden re|x>rted: "Tall, gray and gangly, with a thin but mobile mouth and an otherwise eminently forgettable face. McLuhan was dressed in an ill-fitting brown tweed suit, black shoes and a clip-on necktie. As we talked on into the night before a crackling fire, McLuhan expressed his reservations al>out the interview—indeed, alx>ut the printed won! itself—as a means of communication, suggesting that the question-and-answer format might impede the in-depth flow of his ideas. I assured him that he would have as much lime—and space—as he wished to develop his thoughts. The result has considerably more lucidity and clarity than Mcl.uhan's readers are accustomed to—perhaps liecause the Q&A format selves to pin him down by counteracting his habit of mercurially changing the subject in midstream of consciousness." Norden began the interview with an allusion to a TV show that was ]M>pular at the time; it was fitting, since Mcl,uhan"s favorite electronic medium was television.

PLAYBOYi To borrow Henry Gibson's oft-repeated one-line poem on Rowan & Martin's l/iugli-In— "Marshall Mcl.uhan, what are you doin"?" MCLUHANi I'm making explorations. I don't know where they're going to take me. My work is designed for the pragmatic purpose (continued on page 124)

MARSHALL MCLUHAN

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of trying to understand our technological environment and its psychic and social consequences. The better part of my work on media is actually somewhat like a safecracker's. I don't know what's inside; maybe it's nothing. I just sit down and start to work. I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out different sequences—until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open. PLAYBOY: Isn't such a methodology some­what erratic and inconsistent—if not, as your critics would maintain, eccentric? MCLUHAN: Any approach to environ­mental problems must be sufficiently flexible and adaptable to encompass the entire environmental matrix, which is in constant flux. Effective study of the media deals not only with the content of the media but with the media themselves and the total cultural environment with­in which the media function. Only by standing aside from any phenomenon and taking an overview can you dis­cover its operative principles and lines of force. For the past 3,500 years of the Western world, the effects of media— whether it's speech, writing, printing, photography, radio or television—have been systematically overlooked by social observers. Even in today's revolution­ary electronic age, scholars evidence few signs of modifying this traditional stance of ostrichlike disregard. PLAYBOY: Why?

MCLUHAN: Because all media, from the phonetic alphabet to the computer, are extensions of man that cause deep and lasting changes in him and transform his environment. Such an extension is an intensification, an amplification of an organ, sense or function, and whenever it takes place, the central nervous sys­tem appears to institute a self-protective numbing of the affected area, insulat­ing and anesthetizing it from conscious awareness of what's happening to it. It's a process rather like that which occurs to the body under shock or stress con­ditions, or to the mind in line with the Freudian concept of repression. This problem is doubly acute today because man must, as a simple survival strat­egy, become aware of what is happen­ing to him, despite the attendant pain of such comprehension. The fact that he has not done so in this age of elec­tronics is what has made this also the age of anxiety. We live in the first age when change occurs sufficiently rapidly to make such pattern recognition pos­sible for society at large. Until the pres­ent era, this awareness has always been reflected first by the artist, who has had the power—and courage—of the seer to read the language of the outer world and relate it to the inner world. PLAYBOY: Why should it be the artist rath­er than the scientist who perceives these relationships and foresees these trends?

MCLUHAN: Because inherent in the art­ist's creative inspiration is the process of subliminally sniffing out environmental change. It's always been the artist who perceives the alterations in man caused by a new medium, who recognizes that the future is the present and uses his work to prepare the ground for it. But most people, from truck drivers to the literary Brahmins, are still blissfully ig­norant of what the media do to them; unaware that because of their pervasive effects on man, it is the medium itself that is the message, not the content, and unaware that the medium is also the massage—that, all puns aside, it literally works over and saturates and molds and transforms every sense ratio. The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the sten­ciling on the casing of an atomic bomb. But the ability to perceive media-induced extensions of man, once the province of the artist, is now being expanded as the new environment of electric information makes possible a new degree of percep­tion and critical awareness by nonartists. PLAYBOY: A good deal of the perplexity surrounding your theories is related to this postulation of hot and cool media. Could you give us a brief definition of each? MCLUHAN: Basically, a hot medium ex­cludes and a cool medium includes; hot media are low in participation, or com­pletion, by the audience and cool media are high in participation. A hot medium is one that extends a single sense with high definition. High definition means a complete filling in of data by the medium without intense audience participation. A photograph, for example, is high defini­tion or hot; whereas a cartoon is low defi­nition or cool, because the rough outline drawing provides very little visual data and requires the viewer to fill in or com­plete the image himself. The telephone, which gives the ear relatively little data, is thus cool, as is speech; both demand considerable filling in by the listener. On the other hand, radio is a hot medium because it sharply and intensely pro­vides great amounts of high-definition auditory information that leaves little or nothing to be filled in by the audience. A lecture, by the same token, is hot, but a seminar is cool; a book is hot, but a con­versation or bull session is cool. In a cool medium, the audience is an active con­stituent of the viewing or listening ex­perience. A girl wearing open-mesh silk stockings or glasses is inherently cool and sensual because the eye acts as a surro­gate hand in filling in the low-definition image thus engendered. Which is why boys make passes at girls who wear glasses. In any case, the overwhelming majority of our technologies and enter­tainments since the introduction of print technology have been hot, fragmented and exclusive, but in the age of television we see a return to cool values and the in­clusive in-depth involvement and partici­pation they engender. This is, of course,

just one more reason why the medium is the message, rather than the content; it is the participatory nature of the TV experience itself that is important, rather than the content of the particular TV im­age that is being invisibly and indelibly inscribed on our skins. PLAYBOY: Even if, as you contend, the me­dium is the ultimate message, how can you entirely discount the importance of content? Didn't the content of Hitler's radio speeches, for example, have some effect on the Germans? MCLUHAN: By stressing that the medium is the message rather than the content, I'm not suggesting that content plays no role—merely that it plays a distinctly sub­ordinate role. Even if Hitler had delivered botany lectures, some other demagogue would have used the radio to retribalize the Germans and rekindle the dark ata­vistic side of the tribal nature that created European fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. By placing all the stress on content and practically none on the medium, we lose all chance of perceiving and influencing the impact of new technologies on man, and thus we are always dumbfounded by—and unprepared for—the revolution­ary environmental transformations in­duced by new media. Buffeted by environ­mental changes he cannot comprehend, man echoes the last plaintive cry of his tribal ancestor, Tarzan, as he plummeted to earth: "Who greased my vine?" The German Jew victimized by the Nazis be­cause his old tribalism clashed with their new tribalism could no more understand why his world was turned upside down than the American today can understand the reconfiguration of social and political institutions caused by the electric media in general and television in particular. PLAYBOY: How is television reshaping our political institutions?

MCLUHAN: TV is revolutionizing every political system in the Western world. For one thing, it's creating a totally new type of national leader, a man who is much more of a tribal chieftain than a politi­cian. Castro is a good example of the new tribal chieftain who rules his coun­try by a mass-participational TV dialogue and feedback; he governs his country on camera, by giving the Cuban people the experience of being directly and in­timately involved in the process of col­lective decision making. Castro's adroit blend of political education, propaganda and avuncular guidance is the pattern for tribal chieftains in other countries. The new political showman has to literally as well as figuratively put on his audience as he would a suit of clothes and become a corporate tribal image—like Mussolini, Hitler and FDR in the days of radio, and Jack Kennedy in the television era. All these men were tribal emperors on a scale theretofore unknown in the world, because they all mastered their media. PLAYBOY: How did Kennedy use TV in a manner different from his predecessors— or successors?

MCLUHAN: Kennedy was the first TV presi­dent because he was the first prominent American politician to ever understand the dynamics and lines of force of the televi­sion iconoscope. As I've explained, TV is an inherently cool medium, and Kennedy had a compatible coolness and indiffer­ence to power, bred of personal wealth, which allowed him to adapt fully to TV. Any political candidate who doesn't have such cool, low-definition qualities, which allow the viewer to fill in the gaps with his own personal identification, simply elec­trocutes himself on television—as Richard Nixon did in his disastrous debates with Kennedy in the 1960 campaign. Nixon was essentially hot; he presented a high-definition, sharply defined image and ac­tion on the TV screen that contributed to his reputation as a phony—the "Tricky Dicky" syndrome that has dogged his foot­steps for years. "Would you buy a used car from this man?" the political cartoon asked—and the answer was no, because he didn't project the cool aura of disinterest and objectivity that Kennedy emanated so effortlessly and engagingly. PLAYBOY: How did Lyndon Johnson make use of television?

MCLUHAN: He botched it the same way Nixon did. He was too intense, too ob­sessed with making his audience love and revere him as father and teacher, and too classifiable. Would people feel any safer buying a used car from LBJ than from the old Nixon? The answer is, obviously, no. Johnson became a stereotype—even a parody—of himself, and earned the same reputation as a phony that plagued Nixon for so long. The people wouldn't have cared if John Kennedy lied to them on TV, but they couldn't stomach LBJ even when he told the truth.

PLAYBOY: Do you relate this identity crisis to the current social unrest and violence in the United States?

MCLUHAN: Yes, and to the booming busi­ness psychiatrists are doing. All our alien­ation and atomization are reflected in the crumbling of such time-honored social values as the right of privacy and the sanc­tity of the individual; as they yield to the intensities of the new technology's electric circus, it seems to the average citizen that the sky is falling in. As man is tribally meta­morphosed by the electric media, we all become Chicken Littles, scurrying around frantically in search of our former identi­ties, and in the process unleash tremen­dous violence. As the preliterate confronts the literate in the postliterate arena, as new information patterns inundate and uproot the old, mental breakdowns of varying degrees—including the collective nervous breakdowns of whole societies un­able to resolve their crises of identity—will become very common. It is not an easy period in which to live, especially for the television-conditioned young who, unlike their literate elders, cannot take refuge in the zombie trance of Narcissus narco­sis that numbs the state of psychic shock induced by the impact of the new media. From Tokyo to Paris to Columbia, youth mindlessly acts out its identity quest in the theater of the streets, searching not for goals but for roles, striving for an identity that eludes them.

PLAYBOY: Do you think the surviving hippie subculture is a reflection of youth's rejection of the values of our me­chanical society?

MCLUHAN: Of course. These kids are fed up with jobs and goals and are determined to forget their own roles and involvement in society. They want nothing to do with our

fragmented and specialist consumer soci­ety. Take the field of fashion, for example, which now finds boys and girls dressing alike and wearing their hair alike, reflect­ing the unisexuality deriving from the shift from visual to tactile. The younger generation's whole orientation is toward a return to the native, as reflected by their costumes, their music, their long hair and their sociosexual behavior. Our teen­age generation is already becoming part of a jungle clan. As youth enters this clan world and all their senses are electrically extended and intensified, there is a cor­responding amplification of their sexual sensibilities. Nudity and unabashed sexu­ality are growing in the electric age because as TV tattoos its message directly on our skins, it renders clothing obsolescent and a barrier, and the new tactility makes it natural for kids to constantly touch one another—as reflected by the button sold in the psychedelic shops: ik it moves, kondle it. The electric media, by stimulating all the senses simultaneously, also give a new and richer sensual dimension to everyday sexuality that makes Henry Miller's style of randy rutting old-fashioned and obsolete. Once a society enters the all-involving trib­al mode, it is inevitable that our attitudes toward sexuality change. We see, for exam­ple, the ease with which young people live guiltlessly with one another, or, as among the hippies, in communal menages. This is completely tribal.

PLAYBOY: But aren't most tribal societies sexually restrictive rather than permissive? MCLUHAN: Actually, they're both. Virginity is not, with a few exceptions, the tribal style in most primitive societies; young people tend to have total sexual access to one an­other until marriage. But after marriage, the wife becomes a jealously guarded pos­session and adultery a paramount sin.

Today, as the old values collapse and we see an exhilarating release of pent-up sexual frustrations, we are all inundated by a tidal wave of emphasis on sex. Far from liberating the libido, however, such onslaughts seem to have induced jaded attitudes and a kind of psychosexual weltschmerz. No sensitivity of sensual re­sponse can survive such an assault, which stimulates the mechanical view of the body as capable of experiencing specific thrills, but not total sexual-emotional involve­ment and transcendence. It contributes to the schism between sexual enjoyment and reproduction that is so prevalent, and it also strengthens the case for homosexual­ity. Projecting current trends, the love ma­chine would appear a natural development in the near future—not just the current computerized date-finder, but a machine whereby ultimate orgasm is achieved by direct mechanical stimulation of the plea­sure circuits of the brain. PLAYBOY: Do we detect a note of disap­proval in your analysis of the growing sexual freedom?

MCLUHAN: No, I neither approve nor dis­approve. I merely try to understand. Sexu­al freedom is as natural to newly tribalized youth as drugs. PLAYBOY: What's natural about drugs?

MCLUHAN: They're natural means of smoothing cultural transitions, and also a shortcut into the electric vortex. The up­surge in drug taking is intimately related to the impact of the electric media. Look at the metaphor for getting high: turning on. One turns on his consciousness through drugs just as he opens up all his senses to a total depth involvement by turning on the TV dial. Drug taking is stimulated by today's pervasive environment of instant information, with its feedback mechanism of the inner trip. The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it's the universal experience of TV watchers. PLAYBOY: A Columbia coed was recently quoted in Newsweek as equating you and LSD. "LSD doesn't mean anything un­til you consume it," she said. "Likewise McLuhan." Do you see any similarities? MCLUHAN: I'm flattered to hear my work described as hallucinogenic, but I suspect that some of my academic critics find me a bad trip.

PLAYBOY: Have you ever taken LSD yourself? MCLUHAN: No, I never have. PLAYBOY: Are you in favor of legalizing marijuana and hallucinogenic drugs? MCLUHAN: My personal point of view is irrelevant, since all such legal restrictions are futile and will inevitably wither away. You could as easily ban drugs in a retrib-alized society as outlaw clocks in a me­chanical culture. The young will continue turning on no matter how many of them are turned off into prisons, and such legal restrictions only reflect the cultural aggres­sion and revenge of a dying culture against its successor.

PLAYBOY: If personal freedom will still exist—although restricted by certain con­sensual taboos—in this new tribal world, what about the political system most closely associated with individual freedom: de­mocracy? Will it, too, survive the transition to your global village? MCLUHAN: No, it will not. The day of po­litical democracy as we know it today is fin­ished. Let me stress again that individual freedom itself will not be submerged in the new tribal society, but it will certainly as­sume different and more complex dimen­sions. The ballot box, for example, is the product of literate Western culture—a hot box in a cool world—and thus obsolescent. The tribal will is consensually expressed through the simultaneous interplay of all members of a community that is deeply interrelated and involved, and would thus consider the casting of a "private" ballot in a shrouded polling booth a ludicrous anachronism. The TV networks' comput­ers, by "projecting" a victor in a presiden­tial race while the polls are still open, have already rendered the traditional electoral process obsolescent.

PLAYBOY: How will the popular will be reg­istered in the new tribal society if elections are passe?

MCLUHAN: The electric media open up totally new means of registering popular opinion. The old concept of the plebiscite, for example, may take on new relevance; TV could conduct daily plebiscites by pre­senting facts to 200 million people and

providing a computerized feedback of the popular will. But voting, in the traditional sense, is through as we leave the age of po­litical parties, political issues and political goals, and enter an age where the collec­tive tribal image and the iconic image of the tribal chieftain is the overriding po­litical reality. But that's only one of count­less new realities we'll be confronted with in the tribal village. We must understand that a totally new society is coming into being, one that rejects all our old values, conditioned responses, attitudes and insti­tutions. If you have difficulty envisioning something as trivial as the imminent end of elections, you'll be totally unprepared to cope with the prospect of the forthcoming demise of spoken language and its replace­ment by a global consciousness. PLAYBOY: You're right. MCLUHAN: Let me help you. Tribal man is tightly sealed in an integral collective awareness that transcends conventional boundaries of time and space. As such, the new society will be one mythic integration, a resonating world akin to the old tribal echo chamber where magic will live again: a world of ESP. The current interest of youth in astrology, clairvoyance and the oc­cult is no coincidence. Electric technology, you see, does not require words any more than a digital computer requires numbers. Electricity makes possible—and not in the distant future, either—an amplification of human consciousness on a world scale, without any verbalization at all. PLAYBOY: Are you talking about global telepathy?

MCLUHAN: Precisely. Already, computers offer the potential of instantaneous trans­lation of any code or language into any other code or language. If a data feedback is possible through the computer, why not a feed-forward of thought whereby a world consciousness links into a world computer? PLAYBOY: Isn't this projection of an elec­tronically induced world consciousness more mystical than technological? MCLUHAN: Yes—as mystical as the most ad­vanced theories of modem nuclear phys­ics. Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today.

PLAYBOY: You said that all of contempo­rary man's traditional values, attitudes and institutions are going to be destroyed and replaced in and by the new electric age. That's a pretty sweeping generaliza­tion. Apart from the complex psychosocial metamorphoses you've mentioned, would you explain in more detail some of the spe­cific changes you foresee? MCLUHAN: The transformations are taking place everywhere around us. As the old value systems crumble, so do all the insti­tutional clothing and garbage they fash­ioned. The cities, corporate extensions of our physical organs, are withering and be­ing translated along with all other such ex­tensions into information systems, as tele­vision and the jet—by compressing time and space—make all the world one village and destroy the old city-country dichoto­my. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles—all will disappear like the dinosaur. The auto­mobile, too, will soon be as obsolete as the

cities it is currently strangling, replaced by new antigravitational technology. The marketing systems and the stock market as we know them today will soon be dead as the dodo, and automation will end the traditional concept of the job, replacing it with a role, and giving men the breath of leisure. The electric media will create a world of dropouts from the old fragment­ed society, with its neatly compartmental­ized analytic functions, and cause people to drop in to the new integrated global-village community.

PLAYBOY: Despite your personal distaste for the upheavals induced by the new electric technology, you seem to feel that if we understand and influence its effects on us, a less alienated and fragmented soci­ety may emerge from it. Is it thus accurate to say that you are essentially optimistic about the future?

MCLUHAN: There are grounds for both optimism and pessimism. The extensions of man's consciousness induced by the electric media could conceivably usher in the millennium, but it also holds the potential for realizing the Antichrist— Yeats's rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. Cataclysmic environmen­tal changes such as these are, in and of themselves, morally neutral; it is how we perceive them and react to them that will determine their ultimate psychic and social consequences. If we refuse to see them at all, we will become their servants. It's inevitable that the world-pool of elec­tronic information movement will toss us all about like corks on a stormy sea, but if we keep our cool during the descent into the maelstrom, studying the process as it happens to us and what we can do about it, we can come through.

Personally, I have a great faith in the resiliency and adaptability of man, and I tend to look to our tomorrows with a surge of excitement and hope. I feel that we're standing on the threshold of a liberating and exhilarating world in which the hu­man tribe can become truly one family and man's consciousness can be freed from the shackles of mechanical culture and enabled to roam the cosmos.

I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an or­ganic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey. To be born in this age is a precious gift, and I regret the pros­pect of my own death only because I will leave so many pages of man's destiny—if you will excuse the Gutenbergian image— tantalizingly unread. But perhaps, as I've tried to demonstrate in my examination of the postliterate culture, the story begins only when the book closes.

Excerpted from the March 1969 issue.