the medium is the MASSAGE notes

the medium is the MASSAGE
an inventory of effects (1967)

by marshall mcluhan
And quentin fiore
produced by jerome agel

What do you think?
•“Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness. ‘Time’ has ceased, ‘space’ has vanished. We now live in a global village. . .a simultaneous happening. We are back in acoustic space. We have begun again to structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us.”

How do our media shape us?
•“Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men (sic) communicate than by the content of the communication. . .The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialization and detachment.” (8)

Everything is changing
•“Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions. . .Youth instinctively understands the present environment -- the electric drama. It lives mythically and in-depth. This is the reason for the great alienation between the generations.”

Can we learn through humor?
•“Learning, the educational process, has long been associated only with the glum.
We speak of the ‘serious’ student. . .Students of media are persistently attached as evaders, idly concentrating on means or processors rather than on ‘substance.’”

How it affects you
•“Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community‘s need to know. The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions. . .are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval.”

Your family: all the world’s a sage
•“The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by electric media. . .far surpasses any possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear.”

Your neighborhood
•“Electric circuitry. . .has reconstituted dialogue on a global scale. . .The old civic, state and national groupings have become unworkable.”

Is this your education?
•“Today’s television child is attuned to up-to-the-minute ‘adult’ news. . .and is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects and schedules.”

Your government?
•“The public, in the sense of a great consensus of separate and distinct viewpoints, is finished. Today, the mass audience (the successor to the ‘public’) can be used as a creative, participating force. . .Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions.”

Isn’t this now global?
•“. . .minority groups can no longer be contained -- ignored. Too many people know too much about each other. . .We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.”

Do you agree?
•“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”

“All media work us over completely”
•“They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical,, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.”

All media are extensions of some human faculty
•The wheel is an extension of the foot
•The book is an extension of the eye
•Clothing is an extension of the skin
•Electric circuitry is an extension of the central nervous system
•The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act -- the way we perceive the world

How we learn is how we think
•Pre-alphabet societies
–Hearing is believing (intuition prized)
•Literate societies
–Seeing is believing (objectivity prized)
•Technological societies
–Instantaneous, multisensory (all-at-onceness)

Art: the graphic translation of a culture
•“Primitive and pre-alphabet people integrate time and space as one and live in an acoustic, horizontlesss, boundless, olfactory space,, rather than in visual space. Their graphic presentation is like an x-ray. They put in everything they know, rather than only what they see. . .Electric circuitry is recreating in us the multi-dimensional space orientation of the ‘primitive.’”

The new ‘allatonceness’
•“Time has ceased, space has vanished. We now live in a global village. . .a simultaneous happening. . .We must no know in advance the consequences of any policy or action, since the results are experienced without delay. . .We can no longer wait and see. . .Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another.”

Public vs. the Mass
•“Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. . .Print technology created the public. Electric technology created the mass.”

The end of the line
•“The circuited city of the future will not be the huge hunk of concentrated real estate created by the railway. It will take on a totally new meaning under conditions of very rapid movement. It will be an information megalopolis.”

The past went that-a-way
•“When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future. Suburbia lives imaginatively in Bonanza-land.”

Invisible environments
•“Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception. . .We impose the form of the old on the content of the new. The malady lingers on. . .Our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old.”

The teach-in:
from instruction to discovery
•“The young today live mythically and in depth. . .It is a matter of the greatest urgency that our educational institutions realize that we now have civil war among these environments created by media other than the printed word.”

Socrates, “Phaedrus”
•“The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external characters and not remember of themselves. . .they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.”

Authorship unknown
in medieval times
•“The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. . .As new technologies come into play, people are less and less convinced of the importance of self-expression. Teamwork succeeds private effort.”

Does TV do this to you?
•“In television there occurs an extension of the sense of active, exploratory touch which involves all the senses simultaneously, rather than that of sight alone. . .Television demands participation and involvement in depth of the whole being. It will not work as a background. It engages you.”

The television generation
is a grim bunch
•“Most often the few seconds sandwiched between the hours of viewing -- the ‘commercials’ -- reflect a truer understanding of the medium. There simply is no time for the narrative form, borrowed from earlier print technology. The story line must be abandoned.”

Whose fault is it?
•“The main cause for disappointment in and for criticism of television is the failure on the part of its critics to view it as a totally new technology which demands different sensory responses. These critics insist on regarding television as merely a degraded form of print technology.”

Hot wars are fought
in backyards of the world
•“Real, total war has become information war. It is being fought by subtle electric informational media -- under cold conditions, and constantly. The cold war is the real war front -- a surround-involving-everybody--all the time--everywhere.”

Propaganda ends
where dialogue begins
•“You must talk to the media, not to the programmer. To talk to the programmer is like complaining to a hot dog vendor at a ballpark about how badly your favorite team is playing.”