The Medium isthe Massage Marshall MeLuhan Quentin Fiore CCo-ordinated by Jerome Agel Marshall McLuhan is the man who predicted the all- pervasive rise of the modern mass media. Blending text, image and photography, his 1960s classic The Medium is ‘the Massage illustrates how the growth of technology utterly reshapes society, personal lives and sensory perceptions, so that we are effectively shaped by the means we use to ‘communicate. This concept, and his ideas such as rolling, up-to-the-minute news broadcasts and the media ‘global village have proved decades ahead of thei "Themedia prophet ofthe 1960s" The Now York Times “inthe tumult ofthe digital revolution, MeLunan is relevant anew’ Wired How do we see the worl around us? This i one ofa numberof pivotal ‘works by creative thinkers whose writings on art, design end the media have changed our vision fr ever a ® ee | 23z| ux coo TheMediumis @ the Massage Marshall McLuhan Quentin FioreYel] Pntteyite) IvLel lame) MT L=Le Ee [doco Pyar el RSM alloted edn...the massage?“The major advances in civil ization are processes that all but wreck the socie ties in which they occur.” ea ers]The medium, or process, of our time—electric tech- nology—is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. Itis forcing us to reconsider and re- evaluate practically every thought, every action, ‘and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing—you, your family, your neighborhood, your education, your job, your gov- ‘ernment, your relation to “the others.” And they're ‘changing dramatically. Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. The alphabet, for instance, is a technology that is ab- sorbed by the very young child in a completely unconscious manner, by osmosis so to speak. Words and the meaning of words predispose the child to think and act automatically in certain ways. The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of ‘pecialiem and of detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involve- ment, It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the work- ings of media. ‘The older training of dbservation has become’ qui irrelevant inthis new time, because itis based on psychological responses and concepts conditioned by the former technology—mechanization. Innumerablo confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emorge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions. Our "Age of ‘30-milion toy trucks were bought in the U.S. in 1966, Anxiety” is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday's tools—with yester- day's concepts. Youth instinctively understands the present en- Vironment—the electric drama. It ives mythically and in depth. This is the reason for the great alienation between generations. Wars, revolutions, civil uprisings are interfaces within the new envi ronments created by electronic informational media.“In the study of ideas, itis necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sontimental feeling, as it mist, cloaking the perploxities of fact. Insi clarity at all ‘costs is based on sheer su as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reason- ~AN. Whitehead, “Adventures in Ideas.” Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasing, old categories—for probing around, When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively Poised, put in apposition in now and unique ways, startling discoveries often result. Learning, the educational process, has long been associated only with the glum. We speak of the “serious” student. Our time presents a unique ‘opportunity for learning by means of humor—a perceptive or incisive joke can be more meaning- ful than platitudes lying between two covers. “The Medium is the Massage" is a look-around to see what's happening. It is a collide-oscope of interfaced situations. Students of media are porsistently attacked ae evaders, idly concentrating on means or processes rather than on “substance.” The dramatic and rapid changes of “substance” elude these accusers, Survival is not possible if one approaches his ‘environment, the social drama, with a fixed, un- changeable point of view—the witless repetitive response to the unperceived,you How much do you make? Have you ever contemplated suicide? Are you now or have you ever been...? Are you aware of the fact...? I have here be: fore me... Electrical information de- vices for universal, tyrannical womb-to- tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community's need to know. The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions— the patterns of mechianistic technolo gies—are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electrically ‘computerized dossier bank—that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early *mis: takes." We have already reached a point where remedial control, born out of knowledge of media and their total offects on all of us, must be exerted. How shall the new environment be pro- ‘grammed now that we have became so involved with each other, now that all of us havé become the unwitting work force for social change? What's that buzzzzezezzzrzzezrazezzzaz22272iNg? 2 (GHyour family The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by electric media—movies, Telstar, flight— far surpasses any possible influence mom and dad can now bring to boar. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world’s a sage. (Cel | |your neighborhood Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of “time” and “space” and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men. It has re- constituted dialogue on a global scale. Its message is Total Change, ending psychic, social, economic, and political parochialism. The old civic, state, and national groupings have become un: workable. Nothing can be further from the spirit of the new technology than “a place for everything and everything in its place." You can't go home again. 6your education There is a world of difference between the modern home environment of inte~ grated electric information and the classroom. Today's television child is attuned to up-to-the-minute “adult” news—inflation, rioting, war, taxes, crime, bathing beauties—and is bewildered when he enters the nine- teenth-century environment that still characterizes the educational estab- lishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by frag- mented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules. It is naturally an en- vironment much like any factory set-up with its inventories and assembly lines. The “child” was an invention of the seventeenth century; he did not exist in, say, Shakespeare's day. He had, up until that time, been merged in the ‘adult world and there was nothing that Could be called childhood in our sense. Today's child is growing up absurd, be- ‘cause he lives in two worlds, and neither Cf them inclines him to grow up. Grow. ing up—that is our new work, and itis total. Mere instruction will not suffice. .your job “When this circuit learns your job, what are you going to do? “Jobs” represent a relatively recent pattern of work. From the fifteenth Century to the twentieth century, there is a steady progress of fragmentation of the stages of work that constitute *mechanization™ and “specialism.” Those procedures cannot serve for sur vival of sanity in this new time. Under conditions of electric circuitry, all the fragmented job patterns tend to blend once more into involving and demanding roles or forms of work that more and more resemble teaching, learning, and "human® service, in the older sense of dedicated loyalty Unhappily, many well-intentioned politi- cal reform programs that aim at the alleviation of suffering caused by un- ‘employment betray an ignorance of the true nature of media-influence. “Come into’ my parlor,” said the com: puter to the specialist 20my. your government Nose-counting, a cherished part of the eighteenth century fragmentation proc 88, has rapidly become a cumber- some and ineffectual form of social assessment in an environment of in- stant electric speeds. The public, in the sense of a great consensus of separate and distinct viewpoints, is finished. To day, the mass audience (the successor to the “public") can be used as a cre- ative, participating force. It is, instead, merely given packages of passive en- tertainment. Politics offers yesterd answers to today's questions. ‘A new form of “politics” is emerging, and in ways wo haven't yet noticed. The living room has become a voting booth, Participation via television in Freedom Marches, in war, revolution, pollution, and other events is changing everything“the others” participation. We have becon cably involved with, and responsible for, each other. there is absolutely ee ie) inevitability Fh Fe] bye eee co) contemplate what is happening26 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 un- touched, unaffected, unaltered. The modium is the. massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments, All media extensions, ot some human faculty— psychic or physicalanFu - <2 sthepookis an extension of the eye...clothing, an} extension of the skin...electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act— the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change.Now fer the eviderie," sacd the King sane ten He niente “No ¥ i Sacd the Queen,” first th senténce, and. then the evidence te "Nonsense! cried Alice, 50 loudly thot oo oe idea \of having j the sentence first!‘The dominant organ of sensory and social orien tation in pre-alphabet societies was the ear— hearing was believing.” The phonetic alphabet forced the magic world of the ear to yield to the neutral world of the eye. Man was given an eye for an ear. Western history was shaped for some three thou- sand years by the introduction of the phonetic, alephbet, a medium that depends solely on the eye for comprehension. The alphabet is a construct of fragmented bits and parts which have no semantic meaning in themselves, and which must be strung together in a line, bead-like, and in a prescribed order. Its use fostered and encouraged the habit of perceiving all environment in visual and spatial terms—particularly in terms of a space and of a time that are uniform, 6,0,n,ti,n,U.0.Us and c-o-n-n-e-c-t-e-d. ‘The line, the continuum is septence is a prime example— “The eye—it cannot choose but see; ‘we cannot bid the ear be stil ‘ur bodies feel, where'er they be, against or with our will.” “WWordoworth —Laurfasiilasul thuslin 8 became the organizing principle of life. “As we begin, so shall we go.” “Rationality” and logic came to depend on the presentation of connected and sequential facts or concepts. For many people rationality has the connotation, of uniformity and connectiveness, “I don't follow you" means “I don't think what you're saying is rational.” Visual space is uniform, continuous, and con- nected. The rational man in our Western culture is a visual man. The fact that most conscious ex- perience has little “visuality” in itis lost on him. Rationality and visuality have long been inter- changeable terms, but we do not lve in a primarily visual world any more ‘The fragmenting of activities, our habit of thinking in bits and parts—"specialism'— reflected the step- by-step linear departmentalizing process inherent in the technology of the alphabet. whiohinlintouhitiolibiabials..."as we begin, so shall we go” !Heh dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a sacial chart of thi The goose quill put an end to talk. it abolished mystery; it gave architecture and towne; it brought roads and armies, bureaucracy. It was the basic metaphor with which the cycle of civilization be gan, the step from the dark into the light of the mind. The hand that filled the parchment page built a city Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise, Of painting SPEECH, and spi That we by tracing magie linos aro ta Wy WN Vigan tha tas Tomiie Vieira as gaint Vannes tanya Vereirt nates annie gains Ven r as Vaart arian eile leant Teele o a a a a tC t To ro CD ditto To ao Cri Chiro nro Cho iro ditto iiio ro papas Crante device Crane Clonee device ian iag device Cramer device device Cranes Crane lanie device easPrinting, a ditto device Printing, a ditto device Printing, a ditto device Printing, a ditto device Printing, a ditto device Printing, a ditto device Printing, a ditto device Printing, a ditto device Printing, a ditto device Printing, a ditto device Teel Ss MTU Tepe Eee eT sun. cuit Deus tp elle bow it facia tpmniné ad paging né no ta-s hit pifabs marie artlilyy colt tethijs unittlegs teee i repli no mowed f rece Ee ove shonin? adpmagiue ec fw pine fant: ad pmaginem da oe iltzmatculit ec feming cauit eo eityy illie Deus - ex att. Leelris qultiplicarint 2 replece ceccamn «1 interam:2 Domain pifabu tis-2unlantibus wt: uniuedt mathus que mouentur fig tere atts Deus. Ecce dedt vobis.onm dam afferent ferment iy tettan mila ligna que babée i fermecifii ie Qenenis fit :uct finewobis tele: hie arantinis terre. niin: nnerThe Renaissance Legacy. SMe ec ‘The Detached Observer. No Involvement! Screen ecuee acu placed outside the frame of experience. A piazza for everything and everything in its piazza. Rieu Uren Rm esarCnr media involves all of us, all at once. No detachment Eau Scibns enoitsquooo to noit | ebom isnt to noiisisqse 6 mont ‘soitos1q’ beliso ‘eniob’ svituosxe mort noi nwo efi benpiees nor 2i etinw orlw seor'T .obids tsrlt seoqque norlt sone | noitutitaznoo yev ont ni | yewsed ridol— | ssilsinomisqmoo....” juods pniiid efesrsini yinommioo vivitos to tenipsmi to .idpieni esitivitos s2ort to dosa feum ti doidw ni 908Iq i9qx9 to ymoisns orlt sioerini enoizivib seorlt *“owisn nsmud to6 “A call for citters to cit in.” The idea of detention in a closed space as a form cof human punitive corrective action seems to have ‘come in very much in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries at the time perspective and pictorial space was developing in our Western world. The whole concept of enclosure as a means of con- straint and as a means of classifying doesn't work as well in our electronic world. The new feeling that people have about guilt is not something that can be privately assigned to some individual, but is, rather, something shared by everybody, in some mysterious way. This feeling seems to be returning to our midst. In tribal societies we are told that itis a familiar reaction, when some hideous event ‘occurs, for some people to say, “How horrible it ‘must be to fee! like that,” instead of blaming some- body for having done something horrible. This feel- ing is an aspect of the new mass culture we are moving into world of total involvement in which everybody is so profoundly involved with every- body else and in which nobody can really imagine what private guilt can be anymore.6 urs is a brand-new world of allatonceness. “Time” has ceased, "space" has vanished. We now live in global village... simultaneous happening. We are back in acoustic space. We have begun again to structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emo- tions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us, We have had to shift our stress of attention from action to reaction. We must now know in advance the consequences of any policy or action, since the results are experienced without delay. Because of electric speed, we can no longer wait and see. George Washington once remarked, “We haven't heard from Benj. Franklin in Patis this year. We should write him a letter." At the high speeds of electric communication, puroly visual moans of apprehending the world are ‘no longer possible; they are just too slow to be relevant or effective. Unhappily, we confront this new situation with an ‘enormous backlog of outdated mental and psycho. logical responses. We have been left d-a-n grl-i-n-g. Our most impressive words and thoughts betray us— they refer us only to the past, not to the present. Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantane. ‘ously and continuously. As soon as information is, acquired, itis very rapidly replaced by still newer information. Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classifica tion to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co exist in a state of active interplay.Solid integrated circuit COC eee tien asWe have now become aware of the possibilty of arranging the entire human environment as a work of art, as a teaching machine designed to maximize perception and to make everyday learning a proc- ess of discovery. Application of this knowledge would be the equivalent of a thermostat controlling room temperature. It would seem only reasonable to extend such controls to all the sensory throsh- ‘olds of our being. We have no reason to be grate- ful to those who juggle these thresholds in the name of haphazard innovation. ‘An astronomer looking through a 200-inch tele- scope exclaimed that it was going to rain. His assistant asked, "How can you tell?” “Because my corns hurt.” Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. The groundrules, pervasive structure, and over-all pat- tems of environments elude easy perception. Anti environments, or countersituations mado by artiste, provide means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly, The interplay between the old and the new environments cre- ates many problems and confusions. The main Sbstacl oa clear underetanding ofthe effect of the new media is our deeply embedded habit of regarding all phenomena from a fixed point of view. We speak, for instance, of “gaining perspec- tive.” This psychological process derives uncon- sciously from print technology. Print technology created the public. Electric tech- nology created the mass. The public consists of separate individuals walking around with separate, fixed points of view. The new technology demands 69 that we abandon the luxury of this posture, this fragmentary outlook. The method of our time is to use not a single but multiple models for exploration—the technique of the suspended judgment is the discovery of the twentieth century as the technique of invention was the discovery of the nineteenth,‘The end of the line, The railway radically altered the personal outlooks and patterns of social interdependence. It bred and nurtured the American Dream. It created to- tally new urban, social, and family worlds. New ways of work, New ways of management. New legislation, The technology of the railway created the myth of a green pasture world of innocence. It satisfied man's desire to withdraw from society, symbolized by the city, to a rural setting where he could recover his animal and natural self. It was the pas- toral ideal, a Jeffersonian world, an agrarian de- mocracy which was intended to serve as a guide to social policy. It gave us darkest suburbia and its lasting symbol: the lawnmower. 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. What remains of the con: figuration of former “cities” will be very much like World's Fairs™places in which to show off new technology, not places of work or residente. They will be preserved, museumlike, as living monu- ments to the railway era. If we were to dispose of the city now, future societies would reconstruct them, like so-many Williamsburgs.Rie eine acre eRe) Po CN ruc) the abjects, to the flavor of the most recent past. ‘We look at the present through a rear-view mirror Snore ae at men ay lives imaginatively in Bonanza-land.When information to} brushed against information... ice ; Prez x| The stars are so big, The Earth is so small, Stay as you are. the results are startling and effective, The peren- nial quest for involvement, fil-i, takes many forms,er oo our official culture is striving to force the new media to do Rosas)Environments are invisible. Their groundrules,The poet, the artist, the sleuth—whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely *well- adjusted," he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among anti- social types in their power to see environments as they really are. This\need to interface, to con- front environments with a\certain antisocial power, ig manifest in the famous story, “The Emperor's Now Clothes.” “Well-adjusted” courtiers, having vested interests, saw the emperor as beautifully appointed. The “antisocial” brat, unaccustomed to the old environment, clearly saw that the Emperor “ain't got nothin’ on." The new environment was clearly visible toSneed Martin, Larson E, Whipsnade, Chester Snavely, A. Pismo Clam, J. P. Pinkerton Snoop- ington, Mahatma Kane Jeeves—he was always the man on the flying trapeze. On the stage, on the silver screen, all through his life, he swung between the ridiculous and the sublime, using humor as a probe. Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment=of what's really going ‘on-alfords us our most appealing anti-environ mental tool. It doos not deal in theory, but in imme- diate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions. Older societies thrived on purely literary plots. They demanded story lines. Today's humor, on the contrary, has no story line— no sequence. It is usually a compressed overlay of stories, amateur *My educationwas of the most ordinary descrip. tion, consisting‘of little more than the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic at a common day school. My hours out of school were passed at home and in the streets.” Michael Faraday, who had little mathematics and no formal schooling beyond the primary grades, is celebrated as an experimenter who discovered the induction of electricity. He was one of the great founders of modem physics. itis generally acknowledged that bs Faraday's ignorance of mathematics contributed to his inspiration, that it compelled him to develop a simple, nonmathematical concept when he looked for an explanation of his electrical and magnetic, phenomena. Faraday had two qualities that more than made up for his lack of education: fantastic, intuition and independence and originality of mind, Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total ‘awareness of the individual and the critical aware- ness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is ‘contentedly unaware. The “expert” is the man who stays put, “There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.” =J. Robert OppenheimerCER) a, Clair wen ne nod cee a} These are difficult times because we are witness- i Goa oer two great technologies. We approach the new with the psychological conditioning and sensory re sponses to the old, Thie clash naturally occurs in Reger ie ieeyce en nie ea stance, we saw the fear of the new print technology expressed in tho theme Tho Dance of Death. To. COCs Cone mC as the Absurd. Both represent a common failure: the ere ecto Curae aa nmens ment with the tools of the old“The thing of it is, we must live witThe youth of today are not permitted to approach the traditional heritage of mankind through the door of technological awareness. This only possible door for them is slammed in their faces by rear-view- mirror soci, The young today live mythically and in depth, But they encounter instruction in situations organized by means of classified information—subjects are unrelated, they are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint. Many of our institutions suppress all the natural direct experience of youth, who respond with untaught delight to the poetry and the beauty of the new technological environment, the environ: ment of popular culture. It could be their door to all past achievement if studied as an active (and ‘not necessarily benign) force, The student finds no means of involvement for himself and cannot discover how the educational ‘scheme relates to his mythic world of electronically processed data and experience that his clear and direct responses report. It is a matter of the greatest urgency that our edu: cational institutions realize that we now have civil war among these environments created by media other than the printed word. The classroom is now in a vital stitggle for survival with the immensely Persuasive “outside” world created by new informa: tional media. Education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery—to probing and exploration and to the recognition of the lan- guage of forms, ‘The young today reject goals. The want roles— R-O-L-E-S. That is, total involvement. They do not want fragmented, specialized goals or jobs. We now experience simultaneously the dropout, and the teach-in. The two forms are correlative. ‘They belong together. The teach-in represents an, attempt to shift education from instruction to dis- covery, from brainwashing students to brainwash ing instructors. It is a big, dramatic reversal. Viet- ‘nam, as the content of the teach-in, is a very small and perhaps misleading Red Herring, It really has little to do with the teach-in, as such, anymore than with the dropout. The dropout represents a rejection of nineteenth- century technology as manifested in our educa- tional establishments. The teach-in represents a creative effort, switching the educational process from package to discovery. As the audience be- ‘comes a participant in the total electric drama, the classroom can become a scene in which the audience performs an enormous amount of work.Pt ELICATIONil hr 1-10 (0) wc) T\ Tey ey Gl BIBL Wel ye AU loom Bile] Buluaddey si Bulyyowos asnedeg,,“The hell of it is those punks pump over fifteen billion dollars into the economy every year.”c "History as she is harpecite words in rote order.”‘The ear favors no particular *point of view." We are enveloped by sound. It forms a seamless web around us, We say, “Music shall fill the air.” We never say, “Music shall fill a particular segment of the air.” We hear sounds from everywhere, without ever having to focus. Sounds come from *above,” from below," from in “front* of us, from "behind" us, from our “right,” from our “left.” We can’t shut out sound automatically. We simply are not equipped with earlids. Where a visual space is an organized continuum of a uniformed connected kind, the ear ‘world is a world of simultaneous relationships.13 “The discovery of the alphabet will create forget- fulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of them- selves... You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will ‘appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.” Socrates, “Phaedrus” Homer's “Iliad” was the cultural encyclopedia of pre-literate Greece, the didactic vehicle that pro- vided men with guidance for the management of their spiritual, ethical, and social lives. All the por: suasive skills of the poetic and the dramatic idiom ‘were marshaled to insure the faithful transmission of the tradition from generation to generation. These Bardic songs were rhythmically organized with great formal mastery into metrical patterns which insured that everyone was psychologically attuned to memorization and to easy recall. There was no ear illiteracy in pre-literate Greece. In the “Republic,” Plato vigorously attacked the oral, poetized form as a vehicle for communicating knowledge. He pleaded for a more precise method ‘of communication and classification (*The Ideas"), ‘one which would favor the investigation of facts, principles of reality, human nature, and conduct. ‘What the Greeks meant by “poetry” was radically different from what we mean by poetry. Their “poetic” expression was a product of a collective psyche and mind. The mimetic form, a techniquethat exploited rhythm, meter, and music, achieved the desired psychological response in the listener. Listeners could memorize with greater ease what was sung than what was said. Plato attacked this method because it discouraged disputation and ‘argument. It was in his opinion the chief obstacle to abstract, speculative reasoning—he called it “a poison, and an enemy of the people. “Blind,* all-hearing Homer inherited this meta- Phorical mode of speech, a speech which, like a prism, refracts much meaning to a single point. “Precision” is sacrificed for a greater degree of suggestion. Myth is the mode of simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects. Electric circuitry confers a mythic dimension on our ordinary individual and group actions. Our tech: nology forces us to live mythically, but we con- tinue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes. ‘Myth means putting on the audience, putting on one’s environment. The Beatles do this. They are a group of peoplawho suiddenly were able to put on their audience and the English language with musical effects—putting on a whole vesture, a whole time, a Zeit Young people are looking for a formula for put- ting on the universe—participation mystique. They do not look for detached patterns—for ways of re- lating themselves to the world, a la nit contury. 15 Develop A Powerful Memory? A noted, publisher in Chin Teports there is a. simple ted sige fr seicig «power ‘memory: which can pay you red dividends in both. Dosnces_ and] fet” advancement "and wor Tike’ maple to ive you ade poise, neceuary"seliconfidence End eater popularity. ‘According to this publishes many people do not realize how] eck fe could altace thes Tiply by remembering aecurtely fverything they tee, hear, or read Whether in "bases, a cosa ‘ersations with new acqusiatance in which you can] yout To acquaint the readers of this ‘paper with the easy oollow rules for developing skill in remember Jax tything You choose 10 remem, , the publishers have prin fall details of their seltrai ‘method ina. new, book, “Adve tures in Memory,” which will be tailed free to anyone who re ‘quests it. No ebligation. Send your/ Giame, address and. mip code Memory Studien, 3. Diverse Parkway, Dept. 8185, Chiearo, 60614. A’ postcard will deMost people find it difficult to understand purely verbal concepts. They suspect the ear; they don't trust it In general we feel more secure when things are visible, when we can ‘see for ourselves." We ‘admonish children, for instance, to “believe only half of what they see, and nothing of what they hear.” All kinds of “shorthand” systems of notation have been developed to help us see what wo hear. We employ visual and spatial metaphors fora groat many everyday expressions. We insist on employ- ing visual motaphore even when we refer to purely psychological states, such as tendency and dura tion, For instance, we say thereafter when we realy mean thenafer, always when we mean at all imes We are so visually biased that we call our wisest men visionaries, or seers! spelt 7 i) e Reminders—(relics of the past)— in a world of the PRINTED word—efforts to introduce an AUDITORY dimension onto the visual organization of the PAGE: all effect information, RHYTHM, inflection, pauses. Until recent years, these EFFECTS were quite elaborate—they allowed for all sorts of CHANGES of type faces. The NEWSPAPER lay- out provides more variety of AUDITORY effects from typography than the ordinary book page does.Pee aes Eeoie eg cee Rea like fingerprints, eee eer ett Oren erento John Cage: “One must be disinterested, accept that a sound is a sound and a man is a man, give up illusions bout ideas of order, expressions of sentiment, and all the rest of our inherited aesthetic claptrap.” “The highe to have no purpose at al. 1 puts one i -d with nature, in her man- ner of operation.” “Everyone is in the best seat.” revolution.”Listening to the simultaneous messages of Dublin, James Joyce released the greatest flood of oral linguistic music that was ever manipulated into art “The prouts who will invent @ writing there ulti- mately is the poeta, still more learned, who dis- covered the raiding there originally. That's the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso many counterpoint words. What can't be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for. Now the doc: trine obtains, we have occasioning cause causing effects and affects occasionally recausing alter effects.” Joyce is, in the "Wake," making his own Altamira cave drawings of the entire history of the human mind, in terms of its basic gestures and postures during all the phases of human culture and tech: nology. As his title indicates, he saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn cycle Of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but if again, then let's make it a wake or awake or both. Joyce could see no advantage in our remain. ing locked up ta each cultural cycle as in a trance or dream. He discovered the means of living simulta: ‘neously in all cultural modes while quite conscious,“Authorship’—in the sense we know it today, indi- vidual intellectual effort related to the book as an economic commodity—was practically unknown before the advent of print technology. Medieval scholars were indifferent to the precise identity of the "books" they studied. In turn, they rarely signed even what was clearly their own. They were a humble service organization. Procuring texts was often a very tedious and time-consuming task. Many small texts were transmitted into vol- umes of miscellaneous content, very much like “Jottings” in a scrapbook, and, in this transmission, authorship was often lost. ‘The invention printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideamof literary fame and the habit of ‘considering intellectual effort as private property. Mechanical multiples of the same text created a publio~a reading public. The rising consumer- Griented culture became concerned with labels of authenticity and protection against theft and piracy The idea of copyright—“the exclusive right to re- produce, publish, and soll the matter and form of A literary or artistic work’ was born — Xerography—every man’s brain-picker—heralds the times of instant publishing. Anybody can now be come both author and publisher. Take any books on any subject and custom-make your own book by simple xeroxing a chapter from this one, a chapter from that one—instant steal! ‘As new technologies como into play, people are loss and less convinced of the importance of self ‘expression. Teamwork succeeds private effort. A ditto, ditto device. Aditto, ditto device. A ditto, ditto device.