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INSTRUCTIONAL MEDIA

I S B O O K D E A D ?The book showed Man that space had continuity,which resulted in detribalizing the individual.But what happens to book-and Man-in the century of circuitry?By MARSHALL McLUHAN

The book really is a means of creating avisual environment for mankind. Because na-tive societies don't live in a visual world, theylive primarily in an ear world, they don't usetheir eyes the way we do, and so with the com-ing of the forms of alphabetic writing and thebook, especially with print, the whole of man-kind was given an environment-or rather theliterate part of mankind was given an environ-ment-that did strange things to their outlookand inlook.

With the coming of visual space, or with lit-eracy, man began to live in a world in whichthe space around himnwas a continuum of con-nected uniform pattern.In the Middle Ages there was no space toMedieval man that was uniform or connectedor continuous. He did not think of the spacebetween him and the next man, or between himand the cathedral as a continuum. This hasbeen thoroughly investigated in our time byvarious art historians. They are amazed to dis-cover that as late as the 15th Century, peopledid not imagine that space had any continuityor connectedness.You have heard of Hieronymus Bosch and hishorror, "The Temptations of St. Anthony."The temptation of St. Anthony is a horrorcreated by putting two kinds of space together.Bosch takes the old medieval spaces, the oldicons, and the old images in their own separatespace bubbles, and he juxtaposes them with thenew three-dimensional pictorial perspectivespace of the Renaissance, which was a brand

Dr. Marshall McLuhan, communication theoristand author, is currently on leave of absencefromthe Center for Culture and Technology at theUniversityof Tormontoo hold an Albert SchweitzerChair in the humanities at Fordham University.The article presented here is adapted from a speechbefore McGraw-Hill Company editors. Reprintedfrom College and University Business, December967, Copyright McGraw-Hi.l, Inc. All rights re-served.--R.A.W.

new discovery, and by putting the two thingstogether he creates your horror.Eric Havelock in his wonderful book called"Preface to Plato" describes this contrast or thisconflict as it occurred in the Greek world. Withthe rise of pictorial space and literacy, the di-vision of the world of Socrates, the old oralworld or auditory world, and the new visualworld became acute. It was a division betweenthe corporate man and the private individualman, the detribalized man. With literacy comesdetribalizing of the individual. By the sametoken, with circuitry comes retribalizing, theend of the individual.

Under electronic conditions, all the frag-mented specialist forms of work merge intoroles. With xerography, the reader becomespublisher. In the older, slightly older, periodthe typewriter enabled the writer, the author,to become publisher. Anything he typed was ina sense published. It did change the forms ofwriting. It had an effect on the short story andon poetry and on literature generally, and ithad a profound effect on the origanization ofbusiness energies.But xerography, by enabling the ordinarywriter to publish or reproduce anything at all,can add a soundtrack to any book one choosesto photograph. He can add any part of anybook to any other book, doing a kind of AndyWorhal montage.The possibilities in terms of flexibility arevery much like those of the ancient scribe. Inthe ancient world, the scribe was publisher andauthor and reader. All those functions weremerged. They weren't specialized.The scribe performed his tasks for the bene-fits of immediate patrons and the little circle offriends who needed a particular service. Withxerography, the book becomes, by tendency, aservice for individuals, a tailor-made custom-built service rather than a uniform manufac-tured package. This is the tendency of xerog-

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448 The CLEARING HOUSE March 1968raphy. It's the application of electric circuitryto an old mechanical industry. It tends towardthe transformation of book into service, a ser-vice industry, not for the general public, but forthe private person, for the immediate needs ofa particular reader, which he can satisfy bygoing and dialing a telephone number.When print was new, it created a new en-vironment called the public. There had neverbeen a public before printing. There had beenreaders, little groups, little modules, nucleihere and there, but there had been no public,even in ancient Rome. There wasn't enoughpower in the technology of the scriptorium tocreate a public, or a market.With print came public and market. Theprinted form was the first commodity that wasuniform and repeatable. It was the archetypeof all subsequent industrial production. Withxerography, the reverse seems to go into effect,and the uniform, the market would seem to bethreatened; the very existence of a market witha price system would seem to be threatened bythis service industry.It becomes as much a service industry as sur-gery, or could, unless something is done aboutit, effectively. People have pointed out thatthere is already a strong tendency among authorsto set their sights not on the reading public anymore, but on patrons, foundations, State De-partment, Pentagon. Even poets, apparently,keep these areas in mind in their authorship,or some thoughts, but the public has a peculiarstructure. It consists of private individuals, eachwith a private point of view.The mass created by electronic circuitrydoesn't have that structure. It's an all-at-onceevent. It's a happening. Everything happens atonce. Everybody is involved in everybody in"In Cold Blood." When everybody is involvedin everybody, nobody is responsible for any-thing, or everybody is equally responsible, sothat the murderer in "In Cold Blood" wouldseem to be the author, or the reader, but notthe people named in the book. Responsibilitybecomes so diffused and so pervasive that acompletely new concept of human relationshipis introduced. The mass is a product of not num-bers, but speed.When everything happens at once, you have

mass. It doesn't matter how many, as long asthey are all the same moment. The newspaper,the telegraph services of a newspaper, creates amass audience in a sense that everything hap-pens at once. When everything happens at once,you don't have a story line. You have a date-line.

In newspaper, there is no story line. Theevents are totally unrelated to one another ex-cept by a dateline. That is a happening. Thenewspaper was a happening in the fullest senseof the word, artistically, decades before the hap-penings began to break out in New York, but Ithink we do have to consider to what extent dowe prize these and value the various forms tothe extent that we are determined to continuethem and to maintain them against certaintypes of forces of change.The reason that I don't appear to have anystrong feelings about these matters is quitesimply that these forces seem to me so vast thatto have, to merely entertain, a private opinionabout their goodness or badness, would be akind of ridiculous impertinence, but I thinkthat those values associated with the writtenand printed word should be a permanent partof the human heritage. They give us the meansof detachment and noninvolvement in experi-ence which is indispensable to many forms ofhuman achievement.

The natural tendency of any new technologyis to be given the job of the old one, and this isvery true of the computer. It has been set theold tasks of classified data and the recall ofclassified data. In actual fact, the computercould be a tremendous source of discovery andinnovation because recall at high speeds createsan interphase of old knowledge which yieldsnew knowledge.The computer can be deliberately programedto be a means of interphase that will reveal allsorts of new patterns in old forms. It couldbecome an incredibly rich source of new in-sight. This is the way it works out in "Finne-gans Wake.""Finnegans Wake" takes the human languageas the great and ultimate computer and storagesystem of all time and, by a system of punning,recalls, reveals fascinating new forms in the oldexperiences.