Sample Transcripts from The Video McLuhan

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

Ohio State University Interview by Gilbert Seldes, Edgar Dale, Keith Tyler, 1958
Seldes	On one side were all trying to find out what is the nature of the new communications. What is the special nature of each one of the media such as say the moving picture or broadcasting? What is the nature of all of them, all of the mass media as we call them put together, and I think that from that, almost everybody, deciding what is the essence? Were not prejudiced. I think we all then want to say what do all the media do to us, and then I put my own specialty in - what do we do about them? And I dont think I differ too much from you, Mr. McLuhan?
McLuhan	No, Ive learned a great deal from your own work, Mr. Seldes, and you were in this field before any of us. And weve toiled along in your footsteps, as it were.
Seldes	All right. You share however, Im pretty sure, share enthusiasm for someone else -- Harold Innis, the Canadian economist. Dont you think that he phrased the essence really of the revolution in - you probably know the actual words that he used - of the connection between an enormous change in the means of communication and the change following in society?
McLuhan	His notion that any change in handling information, communication is bound to cause a great readjustment of all the social patterns, the educational patterns, the sources and conditions of political power, public opinion patterns will change. But he got into that track rather interestingly, you see as an economic historian - he had been studying railways and the cod fisheries, the fur trade and the pulp and paper and he moved then from staples as forms of shaping economic life, to media as staples, and he began to study the new media as really basic economic resources, and much as for example cotton in the south has shaped a whole culture, now radio is shaping a global culture. Its global in the extent of its resource availability. So what would appear to be in the offing is a global culture conformable to a staple like radio as the southern culture was conformable to cotton.
Seldes	Then he went on...the simple example that after print came in, the whole feudal system broke. And what Im worried about, and he didnt live long enough to predict any of this, is what is going to break, where is the shift of power going to be in present time?
McLuhan	royal hotel KudjapeThe tremendous developments that we made in individual private habits of study, isolated effort, inner direction and so on - these are likely to take the rap from media that are so inclusive of the whole of society and at all levels. Think of the tremendous shift in political power that is going on at this moment through the use of television in politics. McCarthy folded in a week after he went on television. If Huey Long had gone on the T.V., he would have been a flop at once. T.V. will not take a sharp character, a hot character. Its a cool medium and our politics are being cooled off to the point of rigor mortis, according to many people.
Dale	Why won't he look good? Why not?
McLuhan	hotels in GenevaThe nature of this medium which calls for so much participation does not give you a completed package, a completed image. You have to make your image as you go. Therefore, if the person who comes in front of the T.V. camera is already a very complete and classifiable type of person - a politician, a highly obvious doctor type, lawyer type - the medium rejects him because theres nothing left for the audience to do or to complete and they say this guys a phony. Theres something wrong with this guy.
Tyler	Id like to have you react to this notion that since the founding of our country, we have the balance of power progressively go from a very small group that were building you know, and have property rights and so on, gradually spread to a larger and larger group. Now how does television fit into this? We have practically universal television as far as it being in the homes of...Does this mean that the power more and more is flowing really to the popular group?
McLuhan	Yes. Literally the participation of the whole population in the political process becomes very deep. And whereas its no longer a question of assessing arguments, platforms, regional planks and so on - everybody is with it, all age groups. Yes the issues are no longer given to you on single planes and single platforms, they are total.
Tyler	But this is a very good point about being deep. Is this actually a kind of a pseudo event?
McLuhan	No.
Tyler	You think you are with reality but really you are having prepared for you on television, those aspects they want you to see which gives you a feeling of participation.
McLuhan	The audience is making a new form of association among its own members. They are making a new reality, a new art form.
Dale	You dont think we are learning more things superficially?
McLuhan	No.
Seldes	You dont?
McLuhan	No. This is an age in which the new criticism or psychology or anything else, every...the word used in all these forms is depth. Reading in depth, psychology in depth, everything now is in depth.
Seldes	But these are the relatively few experts and outsiders...
McLuhan	No no no no.
Seldes	Your implication now is it seems to be the opposite of what you were saying a few minutes ago. Im not trying to trap you, Marshall. Im trying to find out. Now, at one point, its my feeling that the thing we need to be troubled about by these mass media is their creation of the non individualistic person, the man who is with it so hes with what everyones doing, the...to use what is now a hackneyed word, the conformed person. On the other side, you are saying that, however, television can be used to convey information in depth. The implication is it can actually be used to make people think.
McLuhan	The forms of entertainment that work best on television, whether its Paddy Chayefsky or the Parr show, are ones which admit of 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 can capture them at all sorts of strange and offbeat moments of their existence. And this kind of probing and peeling off the superficial aspects of people and so on is normal to this medium. It is a depth medium. The movie medium is, by comparison, very much a photographic slick package medium which gives you a very highly defined and a very slick complete package.
Tyler	You know McLuhan, you might do what Ive known you to do, which is tocharacterize the former period as the print period and the present period as the electronic period and kind of point out what sharp distinctions you see.
McLuhan	Well, I think people who are subjected to the arrangement of language visually in lines, highly sequential and precise rigid, develop habits of arranging their lives, arranging their whole social existence, which are very closely geared to these forms. Theyre not specially aware of this. Linearity, though, is not characteristic of radio or television or movies. And so we have been subjected to tremendous new forces, new influences which have broken up the older habits acquired from the print world.
Seldes	Would you say we tend to think in straight lines?
McLuhan	We still like to speak of following a person, or drawing conclusions in lines. And I dont follow you, and I do follow you, sort of thing, it does suggest, yes,that we think of thought itself.
Seldes	But notice our contemporary phrase, I dig you.
McLuhan	Glasgow cheap hotelsAh! This is closer, surely, to the meaning of television, which, incidentally, has had a strange effect on the young, of driving them to the libraries to ask for fact books - the librarians report this tremendous new taste in the young for fact books, not fiction. Ah, well I mean I was thinking the fact book is something you have to dig. You dont read it in a line on just a story level on a single plane, you have to dig a fact book. And the youngsters today dig their reading. They read in depth.
Tyler	ERROR MSGBut in a sense youre saying one of the characteristics of this revolution is people are with things, that is to say, were communicated with so much more rapidly that we are with the events rather than linearly learning about them afterward event by event.
McLuhan	But not a merely descriptive or narrative relation or mere point of view relation. You see, if you have a point of view youre not really with a situation. You have already abstracted an angle, an aspect as yours. In the new situation being with, you dont have a point of view, you merely identify at all levels your whole being. I think its a good time, to bring up a point that when any new form comes into the foreground of things, we naturally look at it through the old stereo. We cant help that. This is normal and were still trying to see how will our previous forms of political and educational patterns persist under television. Were just trying to fit the old things into the new form, instead of asking what is the new form going to do to all the assumptions we had before.
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