Sample Transcripts from accommodation in KrakowThe Video McLuhan

Interview by Frank Kermode, 1964 Interview by Gilbert Seldes, 1958 Interview by Tom Snyder, 1976

BBC Interview by Frank Kermode, 1964
Kermode	In a sense, you have been a historian as youve gone about your work, lets talk first a little, if we may, about your book The Gutenberg Galaxy where you argue that for a long time, without actually understanding it, weve been living in a culture which...in which our whole way of looking at the world has been determined by typography...by the successiveness of print and so on. Would you like to enlarge on that a bit.
McLuhan	Well I remember I decided to write that book when I came across a piece by J.C. Carruthers, the...a psychiatrist, on the African mind in health and disease describing the effects of the printed word on the African populations. It startled me and decided me to plunge in. But we have a better opportunity of seeing our old technologies when they confront other populations elsewhere in the world. The effects they have on most people are so startling and so sudden that we have an opportunity to see what happened to us over many centuries.
Kermode	Yes, which we couldnt see because were inside the system.
McLuhan	Yes.
Kermode	Dont you say that what happened was that we got used to having our information processed as it is in print - that is to say its set out successively, whereas at the root of your thoughts, perhaps, theres the view that we can see the world as an image instantaneously, but that weve chosen, under the pressure of a technology to set it out successively like a block of print.
McLuhan	Well every technology has its own ground rules, as it were. It decides all sorts of arrangements in other spheres. The effect of script and the ability to make inventories and collect data and store data changed many social habits and processes back as early as three thousand BC. However, thats about as early as scripts began. The effects of rearranging ones experience, organizing ones experience by these new extensions of our powers are quite unexpected. Perhaps one way of putting it is to say that writing represents a high degree of specializing of our powers.
Kermode	Yes.
McLuhan	Compared to pre-literate societies, theres a considerable concentration on one faculty when you develop a skill like scripting.
Kermode	Well this is the visual, what you call the visual sense.
McLuhan	Yes, this is a highly specialized stress, compared to anything in ordinary aural societies. Thereve been many studies made of this in various ways, but in our own western world the rise of the phonetic alphabet seems to have had much to do with platonic culture and the ordering of experience in the terms of ideas - classifying of data and experience by ideas.
Kermode	You mean that sight has become the pre-eminent sense as it was with Plato, and it went on being so in so-called civilized, as opposed to primitive societies?
McLuhan	Increasingly so, to the...
Kermode	...and climaxed with the invention of printing...
McLuhan	Printing stepped it up to a considerable pitch, yes.
Kermode	Now how would you describe the impact of the invention of the printing press. Give us some instances of what happened as a consequence of it.
McLuhan	Noordwijk Travel TipsIt created, almost overnight it created what we call a nationalism, what in effect was a public. The old manuscript forms were not sufficiently powerful instruments of technology to create publics in the sense that print was able to do - unified, homogeneous, reading publics. Everything that we prize in our western world in matters of individualism, separatism and of unique point of view and private judgment - all those factors are highly favoured by the printed word, and not really favoured by other forms of culture like radio or...and...or earlier by the...manuscript. But this stepping up of the fragmented, the private, the individual, the private judgment, the point of view, in fact our whole vocabularies underwent huge change with the arrival of such technology.
Kermode	Would it be fair to say, or is this pushing your opinion too far, that the concept of the liberty of the individual, of the freedom of speech if you like, is essentially a typographical matter, which could well disappear in the other kind of culture that were now moving into.
McLuhan	It could indeed, and...if it hasnt already. The whole stress on point of view also creates the image of the importance of expression instead of the importance of belonging and being involved in a deep role in society. The need for private expression comes in with the technical possibility of extending ones voice or ones outlook into the community.
Kermode	Now, could I ask you now about the technology which in your view issuperseding it, and which is having its own effect on our lives, comparable with,though of course entirely differently in kind to the Gutenberg technology?
McLuhan	Well, the Gutenberg technology was mechanical to an extreme degree. In fact it originated a good deal of the later mechanical revolution assembly-line style, and the fragmentation of the operations and functions as the very rationale of industrialization.
Kermode	Yes
McLuhan	This fragmentation had begun much earlier after the hunter and the food gatherers with Neolithic man. I suppose, in an extreme way, one might say that Gutenberg was the last phase of the Neolithic revolution. Gutenberg plus the industrial revolution that followed was a pushing of specialism that came in with the Neolithic man, the agrarian revolution - pushing of specialism all the way, and then suddenly we encountered the electric...or electromagnetism which seems to have a totally different principle. Is it, some people feel, an extension of our nervous system, not an extension merely of our bodies?
Kermode	Hm.
McLuhan	If the wheel is an extension of feet and tools of hands back arms, the electromagnetism seems to be in its technological manifestations an extension of our nerves and becomes mainly an information system. It is above all a feedback or looped system. But the peculiarity, you see, after the age of the wheel, you suddenly encounter the age of the circuit. The wheel pushed to an extreme suddenly acquires opposite characteristics. This seems to happen with a good many technologies, that if they get pushed to a very distant point, they reverse their characteristics. The wheel reversed its characteristics when it became an electric circuit or loop...and the feedback in that loop system has a completely different set of effects on psyche and society, from any effects that the old mechanical technologies had.
Kermode	What difference is the electric technology making to our interest in content in what the medium actually says?
McLuhan	One of the effects of switching over to circuitry from mechanical moving parts and wheels is an enormous increase in the amount of information that is moving. You cannot cope with vast amounts of information in the old fragmentary classified patterns. You tend to go looking for mythic and structural forms in order to manage such complex data, moving at very high speeds. So the electric engineers often speak of pattern recognition as a normal need of people processing data electrically and by computers and so on - the need for pattern recognition. Its a need which the poets foresaw a century ago in their drive back to mythic forms of organizing experience.
Kermode	Yes. And what youre saying is that there is a kind of built-in primitivism in this antithetical technology system that weve got now.
McLuhan	All the propaganda for primitivism seems to have come home to roost in a spectacular way with very large quantities of it being provided by the new technology. We live...were living mythically now and weve continued to think in the old rational patterns of the older technologies but we are suddenly forced to live in such complex and compressed and high speed systems that we inevitably switch into mythic patterns.
Kermode	Well here we are, a couple of archaic literate men, Gutenberg men, talking on the television. What is the audience getting from this? Is it listening to what were saying, or is it feeling the impact of a new electric medium?
McLuhan	There is a book called Is Anybody Listening. Its what worries the advertising men a great deal. The idea of feedback, of being involved in ones own participation, in ones own audience participation, is a natural product of circuitry. Everything under electric conditions is looped. You become folded over into yourself. Your image of yourself changes completely.

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