Video McLuhan / Florida State University Lecture by Marshall McLuhan, 1970

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Tape 5: Lecture by Marshall McLuhan Florida State University, 1970

One of the big flips that's taking place in our time is the changeover from the eye to the ear. And most of us, having grown up in the visual world, are now suddenly confronted with the problems of living in an acoustic world, which is in effect a world of simultaneous information.The visual world has very peculiar properties and the acoustic world has quitedifferent properties. The visual world, which belongs to the old 19th century and which hadbeen around for quite awhile, say from the 16th century anyway, the visual world has theproperties of being sort of continuous and connected and homogeneous, all parts more or lessalike and stayed put. If you had a point of view, that stayed put. The acousticworld, which is the electric world of simultaneity, has no continuity, no homogeneity, noconnections, and no stasis. Everything is changing. So that's quite a big shift, I mean to movefrom one of those worlds to the other is a a very big shift. It's the same shift that Alice inWonderland made you know when she went through the looking glass. She moved out of thevisual world and into the acoustic world when she went through the looking glass.

Now to explain a bit about the implications of this rather large shift. It concerns the wholeproblem of learning and teaching and social life and politics and entertainment and I'm going totry to tie it into some of those places. But first I will try to make it a little bit more meaningfulabout the how we became visual in the first place.

There is only one part of the world that ever did go visual, and that is the western Greco-Roman Hellenistic world and about 500 B.C., something happened which made it possible toflip out of the old acoustic world, which was the normal one of the tribal Greek society, theHomeric world. Something happened which flipped them out of the old Homeric world of thebards into this new rational, philosophically logical, connected, private, individualistic, civilizedworld. And that thing is called the phonetic alphabet. Now the origins of the phonetic alphabet are by no means clear at all. All we know is what it what it did to people. The phoneticalphabet has a very peculiar set of characteristics which are not shared by any other alphabet onthis planet. The phonetic alphabet, the one that you all call the ABCs, has a very peculiarstructure. It is made up of phonemes, that is bits that are meaningless. The 26 letters of ouralphabet have no meaning at all. Now they're called phonemes because that, in linguistic terms,means the smallest possible meaningless bit. Now all the other alphabets in the world, theHebrew and the Arabic and the Hindu, the Chinese and so on, all of those alphabets aremorphemic. The bits they are made of have meaning. Some meaning, however small.

Now one of the peculiar things that happened with the phonetic alphabet was that the peoplewho used it underwent a kind of fission. Their sensory life exploded and the visual part of itwas cut off from the kinetic, acoustic and tactile parts. In all the other parts of the world wherewriting is employed, the visual life has always remained associated with the acoustic life and thetactile life and the kinetic life. The Chinese ideogram is a wonderful instrument of unifiedsensations. It is so richly unified that most people in our 20th century have begun to study itvery carefully as a corrective to our highly specialized alphabet. One of the results of the use ofthe phonetic alphabet was that Euclid could indicate the properties of visual space in hisgeometry. Visual space, unlike any other of the sensory stasis, visual stasis (?) is pretty welltaken care of by Euclid, who explored most of its dimensions. You've heard of non-Euclidiangeometries. Well, in the electric age, the non-Euclidian geometries have come back and Euclidhas been put aside. But with the arrival of Euclid and visual space, you got a very strangepossibility which Plato seized upon and Plato developed his highly systematized philosophy,even more systematized later by Aristotle, his philosophy of the ideas and the idea ofrational control of the passions and of the world of nature.

Now this platonic universe of abstract truth and abstract ideas is inconceivable without thephonetic alphabet. This alphabet gave people some very strange habits too. It filled people withthe idea of imperial domination. Western man with his alphabet has always felt it mandatorythat he impose it upon all other people. He must spread civilization by spreading literacy in alldirections. Now the Romans were the great implementers of this technology. They seized uponthis form of writing to codify their laws and to make them uniformly applicable to all men. Theidea that civilization, meaning a visually organized set of rules and laws for men in general, theidea that such a thing should be spread to all nations coincided with the rise of Christianity. Asfar as I know, Christianity has exactly nothing to do with the Greco-Roman idea of civilization.And so it is very mysterious that Christianity should have undertaken the job of spreading theGreco-Roman alphabet. At the present time, the church is very doubtful about the matter ofspreading Greco-Roman ideas any further than they've gone and the Third World doesn't wantthem. The Third World doesn't want Greco-Roman Hellenistic institutions. The Third Worldbeing the non-literate world.

So it's helpful to know the origins of the alphabet and of civilization and rationality in that sensebecause we have come, in the 20th century, to the end of that road. And it's a considerablerevolution to have been through 2500 years of phonetic literacy, only to encounter the end ofthe road. Right now, people in this room are making the decision whether or not we're going tohave any more literacy or any more civilization in the 20th century, or whether it's going tostop right here.

One of the strange implications of the phonetic alphabet is private identity. Before literacy,before phonetic literacy, there had been no private identity. There had only been the tribalgroup. Homer knows nothing about private identity, Homer's world of the acoustic epic, thetribal encyclopedia of memorized wisdom, which Eric Havelock has reported so ably in hisPreface to Plato, the Homeric epics were part of this acoustic wisdom that preceded literacyand which were phased out by literacy. Homer was wiped out by literacy. Homer had been theeducational establishment of the Greeks for centuries. An educated Greek was one who hadmemorized Homer, who could sing it to his guitar or harp, and perform it in public. He was agentleman and a free man. Along came the phonetic alphabet and Plato seizedupon it and said: Let us abandon Homer and go for rational education. Plato's war on the poetswas not a war on poetry, but a war on the oral tradition of education.Now today everyone in this room is being subjected to a new form of oral education. Literacyis still officially the educational establishment, but unofficially the oral forms are coming up veryfast. This is the meaning of rock. It is a kind of education based upon oral tradition, an acousticexperience which is quite strangely remote from literacy. I will be glad to come back to thewhole problem of rock and its relation to the modern city and the modern society. It's a verybig subject and it is not very much studied. But rock is not something that is merely stuck onto the entertainment card as an extra item. Rock is a kind of central oral form of educationwhich threatens the whole educational establishment. If Homer was wiped out by literacy,literacy can be wiped out by rock. We're playing playing the old story backwards, but youshould know what the stakes are. The stakes are are civilization and versus tribalism andgroupism, private identity versus corporate identity, and private responsibility versus the groupor tribal mandate. Now this naturally is going to affect our political life and I'll come onto that shortly.

This is really just by way of an opening theme. I want to mention by way of explaining myown approach to these matters, that my kind of study in communication is really a study oftransformation. Whereas information theory and all the existing theories of communication that Iknow of are theories of transportation. All the official theories of communication studied in theschools of North America are theories of how you move data from point A to point B to pointC with minimal distortion. That is not what I study at all. Information theory I understand and Iuse, but information theory is a theory of transportation and it has nothing to do with theeffects which these forms have on you. It's like a railway train concerned with moving goodsalong a track. The track may be blocked, may be interfered with. The problem in thetransportation theory of communication is to get the noise, get the interferenceoff the track and let it go through. Many educators think that the problem in education is just toget the information through, get it past the barrier, the opposition of the young, just to move it,move it, keep it going. I have no interest much in that theory.

My theory, or concern, is with what do these media do to the people who use them? What didwriting do to the people who invented it and used it? What do the other media of our time doto the people who use it? So mine is a transformation theory. How people are changed by theinstruments they employ.

One of the peculiar flips that's goes with the change from the acoustic or the visual to theacoustic is a change in joke styles. I'm going to tell you a couple of old-fashioned jokes to showyou what I mean. A friend of mine went to Kennedy Airport a few months ago to get a pickpick up an Irishman who was coming into New York. And on the way in from the airport, theIrishman was enjoying the advertising as he went along. And he was especially attracted by asign which read: Be Younger, Use Ex-lax. And he said: How about that, he said. He said: Whatis Ex-lax? And his friend said: We're coming to a drugstore right now, I'm going to get yousome. And he popped in and brought out a cake of Ex-lax, which the Irishman received andgobbled it down in toto. And with relish. And about a half an hour later, his friend said: Are youfeeling any younger? And the Irishman says: Well, I'm not sure, but I've just done somethingvery foolish. I think he said childish. Now that's an old-fashioned joke. It's got a story line.

Another one on that pattern concerns a a Newfoundland chap who was sitting in an airportwaiting for a plane. And he was sitting beside another man who he gradually spoke to. Airportsare arranged so that you do not speak to anyone. That is, the chairs are arranged so that youwon't be tempted to even notice anybody around you. This is a carefully arranged ploy. Anyway he spoke to this man and he said: What do you do? And the Newfoundlander said: I'm a rancher. I have 40 acres in Newfoundland and I grow a greatvariety of things there and it's a it keeps me very busy. And he said then in turn: What do youdo? And the Texan, who was the other chap, said: I'm a rancher too. And the Newfoundlandersaid: How big is your ranch? Well, said the Texan, if we got in my car about now and drove tilsunset, we'd still be on my ranch. And the Newfie said: Well, you know I had a car like thatonce. Now that's the old style.

The one-liner joke, which has taken the place of the story line, has no plot at all. It'sinstantaneous: easy glum, easy glow. That's the whole thing. Easy glum, easy glow. Or: I maybe crazy but I'm not far from it. That's all the attention span that you're supposed to haveanymore. If Nixon had been the captain of the Titanic, what would what would he have said tothe passengers? He would have said: Ladies and gentlemen, we're stopping for ice.

Well, these are one-liners. The British Empire is the empire on which the sun never setsbecause you cannot trust an Englishman in the dark. One-liners are everywhere and they havetaken the place of the old story line. Story line goes, and by the way the same way with music - melody has given place to the new rock forms. Instead of the tune which goes on and on, youhave simply the broken and fragmented harmonics and juxtapositions of rhythm. Abstractmusic. Abstract art, abstract music is an art in which you pull out the connections. I understandthat you're going to have a sculpture by Picasso on this campus. And abstractsculpture, or abstract art, is an art in which there is no visual component. All you have is theacoustic, tactile, kinetic form. Corbusier, the great architect, said: Architecture is bestappreciated at night in the dark, where you can feel the thrust and the forces at work in thebuilding. This is not visual.

Now cubism, cubism is an art form in which you are given simultaneously the underneath, theoutside, the top and the bottom of an object. Giving it simultaneously in one level. To have allsides simultaneously is not visual. It is acoustic and tactile.So abstract art is an art in which they have pulled out the visual connections. And that beganabout 1900. It's about the same time that the physicists pulled out the connections in matter. Quantum Mechanics 1900 - Max Planch pulled out all the connections that mattered and gave us quantum theory. Quantum theory is simply physics minus the connections. And it's quite easilyunderstood, even by scientists. But don't think they don't have their troubles because one of theproblems of western visual man is that he tries to translate everything into visual terms. It isvery difficult for a western man to take things except in a visual, connected, rational mode.Modern physicists report all their findings in Newtonian terms, which are the old-fashionedvisual language. One of the peculiarities of modern physics is it still uses the old Newtonianlanguage. Newton was all visual. Everything was classified, connected, continuous. Modernphysics has many troubles with the visual problem and the acoustic problem. And theydon't know whether, for example, to have a particle theory or a wave theory of matter. And aparticle theory of matter tends to be visual and a wave theory tends to be kinetic. But modernphysics is divided into the different sensory modes of man. And many members in thetop physics world are quite unable to understand some of the visual aspects or the non-visualaspects of their own field. They're very good at maintaining the general decorum and theconventional respectability of their ... their clan, but in fact they are divided by severe strifewithin.

Speaking of the flips, there's a story that exists somewhere between the story line and the one-liner is the Norman Mailer story at Berkeley. A few months ago, he was addressing a women'slib group and he said to them: Everybody in this hall who regards me as a mail chauvinist pig,hiss. And they all hissed very loudly. And he turned to the chairman and he said: Obedient littlebitches, aren't they? Well, this brings up, you might ask, there are two things that raises -- the newjournalism versus the old, and women's lib. The old journalism used to try to give an objectivepicture of a situation by giving the pro and the con. Objective journalism meant giving bothsides at once. It was strangely assumed that there were two sides to every face. It neveroccurred to them there might be 40 sides, or a thousand sides. No. Two sides: pro and con.And suddenly this form of journalism disappeared and the new journalism popped in,represented by Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and many others, Tom Wolfe. The newjournalism doesn't give you any side. It just immerses you in the feeling of the whole situation.So it just plunges you into the feeling of being at the convention, or being at the fire, beingsomewhere. And it began with that famous phrase: Something funny happened on theway to the Forum. A happening is not a point of view. A happening is all sides at once andeverybody involved in it. Mardi Gras is a happening. You cannot have objective journalismabout Mardi Gras. You just have to immerse. Well, Mailer was one of the authors of the newjournalism of immersion without any point of view. No objectivity, just subjectivity, and hesubheaded his Armies of the Night: fiction as history, history as fiction. So the new journalism,quite frankly, regards itself as a form of fiction, not objectivity at all.

I think you'll find that new politics is in the same position. The old politics had parties, policies,planks, opposition. The new politics has is concerned only with images. The problem in thenew politics is to find the right image. So search committees are formed to find the candidateswho have the right image. Man hunting has become a great big business, both in the militaryworld and in the commercial world and the political world. Image hunting is the new thing, and policies no longer matter because whether your electric light is provided by Republicans orDemocrats is rather unimportant compared to the service of light and power and all the otherkinds of services that go with our cities. Service environment's the thing in place of politicalpolicies. Or so it seems. Now remember I should always add in anything I say that that is theway it seems at the moment.

Now the the Mailer thing a propos of women's lib has this rather large implication. Women's libis not like the old suffragette thing about votes for women. Women's lib is not an attempt tofind a better and more just set-up for women to be employed in. Women's lib concerns atremendous change that's taking place in the entire nature of work. Just as education hasundergone strange changes, so has work. The Japanese Sony plant years ago developed asystem whereby all the workers could bring their children to the plant and send them to school.If they were infants, there was daycare, and if they were school age, they went to school. TheSony plant in Tokyo educated not only the children but educated them at university level andany of the workers who wanted could also go to university. The plant became itself a kind of aplayground and learning and play and work became one thing. Now that isn't too hard to do inJapan because they are a tribal people and live according to family rules. Nobody ever got firedfrom a Japanese plant. He's part of the family. Now this tribalism which they take for granted is something that they're now trying to get rid of and is something toward which we tend to be moving.

But at present in our own world of work, jobs are giving place to role playing. Job holding is giving way to role playing because, at electric speed, it is impossible to specialize.This is one of the problems in education. Subjects become very very dubious as a form oflearning. The interdisciplinary takes on more and more meaning. Media study isinterdisciplinary study. Isolated subjects in the curriculum have become almost a menace toeducation. But in the same way, the specialized job has become impossible in a big plantor in a big business of any sort. It is more and more necessary to know the overall pattern ofthe operation. In these Japanese plants like the Sony plants, the workers were consulted uponthe kinds of innovation, the kinds of products they would make, on any new developments inthe manufacturing process, and they were also consulted on the pricing and marketing of allthese products. And that meant everybody in the plant was consulted ... somebody. There wastotal participation on the part of the workers in that whole operation.

The Japanese today are introducing western literacy into their own culture, are spending $6billion at the present moment in Japan to get rid of their own alphabet and put in our alphabet.Little do they know what is going to happen to them or to us as a result. But the alphabeticman is a very aggressive man, and a very specialized man. So the Japanese world is likely tomanifest enormous increase of energy and aggression when they get our alphabet installed. Itwill also wipe out their whole culture. Scrub it right off. That is their own phonetic or ratherideogramic forms of writing and culture will be destroyed. Now if China follows the samecourse, and it appears to be about to do that, then the transformation of the Chinese world wouldbe very rapid. In 20 years, they will flip out of their culture, wipe out their whole ancientculture in 20 years, and become incredibly aggressive and specialized and goal-orientedbecause the specialist man always has a goal. The visual man has a goal in life. The ear mannever has a goal. He just wants to do his thing wherever he is. So if the Chinese, or theJapanese were to take on our alphabet seriously, they would be in great trouble and we wouldbe too. I don't think they understand what's involved.

Now apropos women's lib, the electric world, because it does not favour specialism, doesfavour women. Men are naturally specialists compared to women. Men are very brittle andunadaptable people compared to women. Women have had through the centuries to adapt tomen, rather than vice versa. So specializing, which used to be taken for granted in modernindustry, has now become very very shaky, and role playing has taken over from job holding inbig business. Role playing means having several jobs simultaneously, or being able to moverapidly from one job to another. A man, a good actor, can play many parts. So women's lib isreally a reply to the new electric conditions of employment in which huge information isavailable simultaneously to everybody. In the electric world, the simultaneity of information isacoustic in the form that it comes from all directions at once. You hear it from all directions atonce. Electric information comes from all directions at once and when information comes fromall directions simultaneously, you are living in an acoustic world. It doesn't matter whetheryou're listening or not, the fact is you're getting this acoustic pattern.

Now when people become acoustically affected, they no longer have goals. They settle downto role playing. Some of you may have seen this show called Upstairs Downstairs on Sundaynights in which you you go down to the servants' quarters. Upstairs is the Forsythe Saga,downstairs the servants. In the servants' quarters, people are playing roles. Upstairs, in theForsythe world of literacy, they are pursuing goals. Downstairs in the servants' quarters inEngland, the servants had no goals. They just had a role, which was static. But it's verydramatic, very involving, and very fulfilling.

Now role playing is a very different thing from goal seeking and in the electric time, we aremoving very much in that direction. The reason that most of you in this room find it difficult toimagine a goal in life is simply that you're living in an electric world where everything happensat once. It's hard to have a fixed point of view in a world where everything is happeningsimultaneously. It is hard to have an objective in a world that is changing faster than you canimagine the objective to be fulfilled. Women's lib, therefore, has very deep roots in the newtechnology and is not just a matter of votes for women. It means that the work that is beingperformed by men today can in many cases be done better by women.

Another strange effect of this electric environment is the total absence of secrecy. What Nixonrefers to as the confidentiality of his role and position is no longer feasible. No form of secrecyis possible at electric speed, whether in the patent world, in the fashion world, or the political world.The pattern sticks out a mile before anybody says anything about it. At electric speed,everything becomes x-ray. So Watergate is simply a nice parable or example of how secrecy wasflipped into show business. The back room boys suddenly found themselves on the stage.Political support for election purposes and so on ceases to be possibly confidential or quiet orsecret and there's no way of having any form of secrecy in this matters. With the end of secrecygoes the end of monopolies of knowledge. There can no longer be a monopoly of knowledgein learning, education, or in power.

Now this, I'm not making value judgments. This would seem to many people a very goodthing, and it may well be a very good thing. I'm simply specifying the pattern or the form thatoccurs when you have instant speed of electric information. You cannot have a monopoly ofknowledge such as most learned people had a few years. You cannot have it under electricconditions. This applies to all professional life, as well as to private life.

Ivan Illich has a book called Deschooling Society in which he argues that since we now live in a worldwhere the information and answers are all outside the school room, let us close the schools.Why spend the child's time inside the school giving him answers that already exist outside? It'sa good question, but his answer or suggestion of closing the schools is somewhat unnecessarybecause it is now possible, instead of putting the answers inside the school, to put the questionsinside.

This might be a good time to mention a little scheme I have for what I call organizedignorance. I've often been puzzled by the fact that the greatest discoveries in the world, whenyou look back, are perfectly easy. They can be put in a textbook. But the same discovery whenyou were looking forward at a problem, impossible. Why is knowledge so easy backwards andso hard forwards? Well, it's obvious that this is true because there isn't anything that has beendiscovered that can't be taught quite easily. Why is it so hard to discover? Well, at first Ithought: Suppose the cancer experts came to the studio with their problem, set up a model oftheir experiments and their procedures in studying cancer, and said: We have got to this pointand we cannot get any further. They'd broadcast that to a million people at once. It is obvious thatthere'd be one person in a million who would see there was no problem at all. In any problemwhatever, one in a million would see no problem. The real problem is: how do you reach thisguy who sees the absence of the problem?

Now let's ask another question: Why is it that the man, one in a million, says there is noproblem? This person is inevitably and naturally untaught, ignorant of all scientific proceduresat all times. The scientist has great trouble looking forward past his problem because hisknowledge gets in the way. It is only the very ignorant person who can get past that problembecause he is not fogged over by knowledge. When you're looking for new answers to newquestions, it is knowledge itself that blocks progress. It is knowledge that creates realignorance, just as wealth creates poverty. Knowledge creates ignorance. Every time a newdiscovery is made, enormous new areas of ignorance are opened up.

One of the greatest human discoveries, the automatic cybernetic governor on the steam engine,was made by an eight year old boy who had the job of pulling the steam cock and every timethe big wheel went around, he pulled the steam cock to let the steam out. He wanted to playmarbles. He tried the string to the wheel and made one of the greatest inventions of all humanhistory. Now the engineers who made the steam engine could not possibly have seen thissimple gimmick. Only an ignorant kid who wanted to play marbles could see such things. Nowthe greatest discoveries in human history are of that kind.

Another strange circumstance attending all discovery and all all investigation is this: The effectscome before the causes. Without any exception, in every given development, in everydiscovery, all the effects come before the cause or the discovery itself. So when thediscovery is finally made, everybody says: Well, anybody could have seen that. The time wasright. So about the time somebody discovers the telephone, there are a thousand peoplewho invent the telephone. And then the law courts are filled with suits for generations. Darwinand Wallace discovered evolution at the same time without any personal acquaintance.

But at the present time, one of the effects that is heaped up a mile high, for which no cause hasyet appeared, but a cause will shortly appear, one of the effects is anti-gravity. At the presenttime, we have an enormous amount of anti-gravitational effect and activity--helicopters,airplanes, astronauts, many things--but we don't have the cause. We just have the effects.Within our lifetimes, or your lifetimes, the cause of anti-gravity, a simple gimmick, will presentitself and all things will levitate instantly. The problem will be how to hold things down on theground. But this is obvious, as obvious as your being there or my being here. The effectsare here. The causes will be here shortly.

The bicycle presented all the causes of the motor car, all the effects of the motor car, justbefore the motor car. The bicycle paved the way for the motor car, everything--the tires andchains, the ball bearings. All the manufacturing problems were solved by the bicycle before themotor car was ever thought of. But the the roads and the services all arrived first and the motorcar arrived last. At the present moment, the motor car is on the way out, not because of oilshortage, but because of something quite different. The motor car as a vehicle had anenormous function to perform in American life. It provided the ultimate form of privacy andthe means of going outside to be alone. North Americans are the only people in the world whogo outside to be alone, and inside to be with people. In every other country in the world,including the Eskimo world, people go outside to be with people and inside to be alone.

Why did the Americans ever hit upon this weird reversed pattern? Well, the answer is available.Americans came to this continent to subdue nature, fast and furious. They tamed it. Theysubdued it. They crushed it. They turned it into the enemy. So naturally you can read about it inMoby Dick or in Hawthorne or in any of our literature. Naturally Americans regard the outsideas the enemy and the inside as the friend. Whereas all the other continents in the world regardthe outside as a friend and the inside as a place of hostility and for defence only. All doors areclosed in the European house. The European family lives in seclusion and privacy inside. Thereis no privacy in the American home. That is why you have to get a grant if you want to study--so you can leave home. But this is a weird pattern and it's very important to understand itbecause it isn't over. The motor car provided this superior means of going outside to bealone, and incidentally going along with it, the great dislike of public transit in America becausepublic transit is where you go outside to be with people. Very distasteful.

The motor car as the supreme form of privacy has been threatened, in fact superseded bytelevision. Television brings the outsideinside and it takes the inside outside. It really pulls the rug out or the highway out fromunder the car. It deprives the car of its rationale and its meaning. If the car had not lost its realmeaning in our lives, there would be no oil price hikes whatever, that is, nobody would even dreamof allowing the oil price hikes to occur. The rise in oil prices, of course, is a promotional deal. There's noquestion. I mean that's well known. But it is something that could have not happenedif the car had not already been obsolescent.

The car has lost its place in the heart of the people. That doesn't mean it's going to disappearovernight. Not at all. All it means is the effects of the car are disappearing. And privacy and service environment are part of the effects. When I say the medium is the message,I'm saying that the motor car is not a medium. The medium is the highway, the factories, andthe oil companies. That is the medium. In other words, the medium of the car is the effects ofthe car. When you pull the effects away, the meaning of the car is gone. The car as anengineering object has nothing to do with these effects. The car is a figure in a ground ofservices. It's when you change the ground that you change the car. The car does not operate asthe medium, but rather as one of the major effects of the medium.

So the medium is the message is not a simple remark, and I've always hesitated to explainit. It really means a hidden environment of services created by an innovation. And the hiddenenvironment of services is the thing that changes people. It is the environment that changespeople, not the technology.

But to come back then momentarily to the problem of Illich and the problem of organizedignorance, Illich says we must close our schools because the answers are now outside,and let the kids go back to work and run around the community and get an education. I'msuggesting that the answer is not that but to put the questions in the classroom and to start a real dialoguethere.

Organized ignorance as a way of bypassing the problem of knowledge as confusion and asblock to discovery brings me onto the subject of Sputnik and the laws of the media. WhenSputnik went up on August 17, 1957, it put the planet inside a manmade environment for thefirst time. Spaceship Earth has no passengers, only crew. Sputnik transformed the planet intoSpaceship Earth with a programmed problem. Ecology became the name of the game from themoment of Sputnik. Nature ended, the planet became an art form inside a manned capsule, andlife will never be the same on this planet again. Nature ended and art took over. Ecology is art.

We now have to confront the need for an ecology of media themselves. It's not just raw materials,but the manmade materials too that now have to be harmonized and resolved in theirinteraction. Mr. Schwartz,in his book called The Responsive Chord,explains this very tricky problem about television as a new environmental medium by saying thatthe TV image uses the eye as an ear. It's a way of drawing attention to the fact that the TVimage has a very different effect on your psychic life than the movie image. And thereforeeducationally speaking, TV has very strange consequences and could never be used as a meretransportation device.

The laws of the media, which are like the Medes and the Persians, are quite simply this: thatevery medium exaggerates some function. Spectacles exaggerate or enlarge or enhance thevisual function. They obsolesce another function. They retrieve a much older function and theyflip into the opposite form. The simplest form I know to illustrate this principle, which works forall media, whether it's a teaspoon, corset, or motorcar, the simplest form is money. Moneyincreases transactions. It obsolesces barter. It retrieves potlatch or conspicuous waste. And itflips into credit cards, which is not money at all.

Now every medium ... starts off by exaggerating something we all have, then finally flippinginto the opposite of itself. The motor car flipped into airplane. But first came the bicycle. TheWright brothers were bicycle men. The gyroscopic principle of the bicycle made possible theairplane. The hula hoop arrived just before the mini-skirt. The hula hoop was a tribal dancewhich preceded the tribal costume. The effects come first. The cause is later. Now the laws ofthe media I simply mention in passing. I could spend a long time on them. I simply mention them inpassing because they are at least a hope that we can reduce this confusion to some sort oforder.

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