The medium, or process, of our time—electric tech-nology—is reshaping and restructuring patterns ofsocial interdependence and every aspect of ourpersonal life. It is 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, yourneighborhood, your education, your job, your gov-ernment, your relation to "the others." And they'rechanging dramatically.

Societies have always been shaped more by thenature of the media by which men communicatethan by the content of the communication. Thealphabet, for instance, is a technology that is ab-sorbed by the very young child in a completelyunconscious manner, by osmosis so to speak.Words and the meaning of words predispose thechild to think and act automatically in certain ways.The alphabet and print technology fostered andencouraged a fragmenting process, a process ofspecialism and of detachment. Electric technologyfosters and encourages unification and involve-ment. It is impossible to understand social andcultural changes without a knowledge of the work-ings of media.

The older training of observation has become quiteirrelevant in this new time, because it is based onpsychological responses and concepts conditionedby the former technology—mechanization.

Innumerable confusions and a profound feelingof despair invariably emerge in periods of greattechnological and cultural transitions. Our "Age of

30-million toy trucks were bought in the U.S. in 1966.

Anxiety" is, in great part, the result of trying todo today's job with yesterday's tools-with yester-day's concepts.

Youth instinctively understands the present en-vironment-the electric drama. It lives mythicallyand in depth. This is the reason for the greatalienation between generations. Wars, revolutions,civil uprisings are interfaces within the new en-vironments created by electric informational media.

10

" In the study of ideas, it is necessary to rememberthat insistence on hard-headed clarity issues fromsentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking theperplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at allcosts is based on sheer superstition as to the modein which human intelligence functions. Our reason-ings grasp at straws for premises and float ongossamers for deductions."

—A. N. Whitehead, "Adventures in Ideas."

Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasingold categories—for probing around. When twoseemingly disparate elements are imaginativelypoised, put in apposition in new and unique ways,startling discoveries often result.

Learning, the educational process, has long beenassociated only with the glum. We speak of the"serious" student. Our time presents a uniqueopportunity for learning by means of humor—aperceptive or incisive joke can be more meaning-ful than platitudes lying between two covers.

"The Medium is the Massage" is a look-around tosee what's happening. It is a collide-oscope ofinterfaced situations.

Students of media are persistently attacked asevaders, idly concentrating on means or processesrather than on "substance." The dramatic and rapidchanges of "substance" elude these accusers.Survival is not possible if one approaches hisenvironment, the social drama, with a fixed, un-changeable point of view—the witless repetitiveresponse to the unperceived.

you

How much do you make? Have youever contemplated suicide? Are younow or have you ever been... ? Are youaware of the fact . . .? I have here be-fore me.... Electrical information de-vices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a veryserious dilemma between our claim toprivacy and the community's need toknow. The older, traditional ideas ofprivate, isolated thoughts and actions—the patterns of mechanistic technolo-gies—are very seriously threatened bynew methods of instantaneous electricinformation retrieval, by the electricallycomputerized dossier bank—that onebig gossip column that is unforgiving,unforgetful and from which there is noredemption, no erasure of early "mis-takes." We have already reached apoint where remedial control, born outof knowledge of media and their totaleffects on all of us, must be exerted.How shall the new environment be pro-grammed now that we have become soinvolved with each other, now that aMof us have become the unwitting workforce for social change? What's thatbuzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzing?

12

your family

The family circle has widened. Theworldpool of information fathered byelectric media—movies, Telstar, flight-far surpasses any possible influencemom and dad can now bring to bear.Character no longer is shaped by onlytwo earnest, fumbling experts. Now allthe world's a sage.

14

yourneighborhoodElectric circuitry has overthrown theregime of "time" and "space" and poursupon us instantly and continuously theconcerns of all other men. It has re-constituted dialogue on a global scale.Its message is Total Change, endingpsychic, social, economic, and politicalparochialism. The old civic, state, andnational groupings have become un-workable. Nothing can be further fromthe spirit of the new technology than"a place for everything and everythingin its place." You can't go home again.

16

youreducationThere is a world of difference betweenthe modern home environment of inte-grated electric information and theclassroom. Today's television child isattuned to up-to-the-minute "adult"news—inflation, rioting, war, taxes,cr ime, bathing beaut ies —and isbewildered when he enters the nine-teenth-century environment that stillcharacterizes the educational estab-lishment where information is scarcebut ordered and structured by frag-mented, classified patterns, subjects,and schedules. It is naturally an en-vironment much like any factory set-upwith its inventories and assembly lines.

The "child" was an invention of theseventeenth century; he did not existin, say, Shakespeare's day. He had, upuntil that time, been merged in theadult world and there was nothing thatcould be called childhood in our sense.

Today's child is growing up absurd, be-cause he lives in two worlds, and neitherof them inclines him to grow up. Grow-ing up—that is our new work, and it istotal. Mere instruction will not suffice.

18

your job

"When this circuit learns your job, whatare you going to do?"

"Jobs" represent a relatively recentpattern of work. From the fifteenthcentury to the twentieth century, thereis a steady progress of fragmentationof the stages of work that constitute"mechanization" and "specialism."These procedures cannot serve for sur-vival or sanity in this new time.

Under conditions of electric circuitry,all the fragmented job patterns tend toblend once more into involving anddemanding roles or forms of work thatmore and more resemble teaching,learning, and "human" service, in theolder sense of dedicated loyalty.

Unhappily, many well-intentioned politi-cal reform programs that aim at thealleviation of suffering caused by un-employment betray an ignorance of thetrue nature of media-influence.

"Come into my parlor," said the com-puter to the specialist.

20

yourgovernment

Nose-counting, a cherished part of theeighteenth-century fragmentation proc-ess, has rapidly become a cumber-some and ineffectual form of socialassessment in an environment of in-stant electric speeds. The public, in thesense of a great consensus of separateand distinct viewpoints, is finished. To-day, the mass audience (the successorto the "public") can be used as a cre-ative, participating force. It is, instead,merely given packages of passive en-tertainment. Politics offers yesterday'sanswers to today's questions.

A new form of "politics" is emerging,and in ways we haven't yet noticed.The living room has become a votingbooth. Participation via television inFreedom Marches, in war, revolution,pollution, and other events is changingeverything.

22

"the others"

The shock of recognition! In an elec-tric information environment, minoritygroups can no longer be contained—ignored. Too many people know toomuch about each other. Our new en-vironment compels commitment andparticipation. We have become irrevo-cably involved with, and responsiblefor, each other.

24

26

All media work us over completely. They are sopervasive in their personal, political, economic,aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and socialconsequences that they leave no part of us un-touched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is themassage. Any understanding of social and culturalchange is impossible without a knowledge of theway media work as environments.

All

mediaareextensionsof

somehumanfaculty—

psychicor

physical.

the book

is an extension of the eye...

clothing, an extension of the skin...

electric circuitry,

an extension ofthecentralnervoussystem

41

Media, by altering the environment, evoke in usunique ratios of sense perceptions. The extensionof any one sense alters the way we think and act—the way we perceive the world.

Whentheseratioschange,

men change.

The dominant organ of sensory and social orienta-tion in pre-alphabet societies was the ear—"hearing was believing." The phonetic alphabetforced the magic world of the ear to yield to theneutral world of the eye. Man was given an eyefor an ear.

Western history was shaped for some three thou-sand years by the introduction of the phoneticalephbet, a medium that depends solely on the eyefor comprehension. The alphabet is a construct offragmented bits and parts which have no semanticmeaning in themselves, and which must be strungtogether in a line, bead-like, and in a prescribedorder. Its use fostered and encouraged the habitof perceiving all environment in visual and spatialterms—particularly in terms of a space and of atime that are uniform,

c,o,n,t,i,n,u,o,u,sandc-o-n-n-e-c-t-e-d.

The line, the continuum

— this sentence is a prime example-

became the organizing principle of life. "As webegin, so shall we go." "Rationality" and logiccame to depend on the presentation of connectedand sequential facts or concepts.

For many people rationality has the connotationof uniformity and connectiveness. "I don't followyou" means "I don't think what you're saying isrational."

Visual space is uniform, continuous, and con-nected. The rational man in our Western cultureis a visual man. The fact that most conscious ex-perience has little "visuality" in it is lost on him.

Rationality and visuality have long been inter-changeable terms, but we do not live in a primarilyvisual world any more.

The fragmenting of activities, our habit of thinkingin bits and parts—"specialism"—reflected the step-by-step linear departmentalizing process inherentin the technology of the alphabet.

"The eye—it cannot choose but see;we cannot bid the ear be still;our bodies feel, where'er they be,against or with our will."

—Wordsworth

45

48

Until writing was invented, man lived in acousticspace: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in thedark of the mind, in the world of emotion, byprimordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a socialchart of this bog.

The goose quill put an end to talk. It abolishedmystery; it gave architecture and towns; it broughtroads and armies, bureaucracy. It was the basicmetaphor with which the cycle of civilization be-gan, the step from the dark into the light of themind. The hand that filled the parchment pagebuilt a city.

Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise,Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes?That we by tracing magic lines are taught,How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?

50

Printing, a ditto device

Printing, a ditto device

Printing, a ditto device confirmed andextended the new visual stress. It provided thefirst uniformly repeatable "commodity," the first as-sembly line—mass production.

It created the portable book, which men could readin privacy and in isolation from others. Man couldnow inspire—and conspire.

Like easel painting, the printed book added muchto the new cult of individualism. The private, fixedpoint of view became possible and literacy con-ferred the power of detachment, non-involvement.

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

61

"A cell for citters to cit in."

The idea of detention in a closed space as a formof human punitive corrective action seems to havecome in very much in the thirteenth and fourteenthcenturies—at the time perspective and pictorialspace was developing in our Western world. Thewhole concept of enclosure as a means of con-straint and as a means of classifying doesn't workas well in our electronic world. The new feelingthat people have about guilt is not something thatcan be privately assigned to some individual, butis, rather, something shared by everybody, in somemysterious way. This feeling seems to be returningto our midst. In tribal societies we are told thatit is a familiar reaction, when some hideous eventoccurs, for some people to say, "How horrible itmust be to feel like that," instead of blaming some-body for having done something horrible. This feel-ing is an aspect of the new mass culture we aremoving into—a world of total involvement in whicheverybody is so profoundly involved with every-body else and in which nobody can really imaginewhat private guilt can be anymore.

63

Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness. "Time"has ceased, "space" has vanished. We now live ina global village...a simultaneous happening. We

are back in acoustic space. We have begun againto structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emo-tions from which a few centuries of literacydivorced us.

We have had to shift our stress of attention fromaction to reaction. We must now know in advancethe consequences of any policy or action, sincethe results are experienced without delay. Becauseof electric speed, we can no longer wait and see.George Washington once remarked, "We haven'theard from Benj. Franklin in Paris this year. Weshould write him a letter."

At the high speeds of electric communication,purely visual means of apprehending the world areno longer possible; they are just too slow to berelevant or effective.

Unhappily, we confront this new situation with anenormous backlog of outdated mental and psycho-logical responses. We have been left d-a-n-g-l-i-n-g. Our most impressive words and thoughtsbetray us—they refer us only to the past, not tothe present.

Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with oneanother. Information pours upon us, instantane-ously and continuously. As soon as information isacquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newerinformation. Our electrically-configured world hasforced us to move from the habit of data classifica-tion to the mode of pattern recognition. We can nolonger build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step,because instant communication insures that allfactors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay.

We have now become aware of the possibility ofarranging the entire human environment as a workof art, as a teaching machine designed to maximizeperception and to make everyday learning a proc-ess of discovery. Application of this knowledgewould be the equivalent of a thermostat controllingroom temperature. It would seem only reasonableto extend such controls to all the sensory thresh-olds of our being. We have no reason to be grate-ful to those who juggle these thresholds in thename of haphazard innovation.

An astronomer looking through a 200-inch tele-scope exclaimed that it was going to rain. Hisassistant asked, "How can you tell?" "Becausemy corns hurt."

Environments are not passive wrappings, but are,rather, active processes which are invisible. Thegroundrules, pervasive structure, and over-all pat-terns of environments elude easy perception. Anti-environments, or countersituations made by artists,provide means of direct attention and enable usto see and understand more clearly. The interplaybetween the old and the new environments cre-ates many problems and confusions. The mainobstacle to a clear understanding of the effects ofthe new media is our deeply embedded habit ofregarding all phenomena from a fixed point ofview. 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 ofseparate individuals walking around with separate,fixed points of view. The new technology demands

69

that we abandon the luxury of this posture, thisfragmentary outlook.

The method of our time is to use not a single butmultiple models for exploration—the technique ofthe suspended judgment is the discovery of thetwentieth century as the technique of inventionwas the discovery of the nineteenth.

70

"It isn't that I don't like current events.There have just been so many of them lately."

72

The end of the line.

The railway radically altered the personal outlooksand patterns of social interdependence. It bredand nurtured the American Dream. It created to-tally new urban, social, and family worlds. Newways of work. New ways of management. Newlegislation.

The technology of the railway created the myth of agreen pasture world of innocence. It satisfiedman's desire to withdraw from society, symbolizedby the city, to a rural setting where he couldrecover 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 guideto social policy. It gave us darkest suburbia andits lasting symbol: the lawnmower.

The circuited city of the future will not be the hugehunk of concentrated real estate created by therailway. It will take on a totally new meaning underconditions of very rapid movement. It will be aninformation megalopolis. What remains of the con-figuration of former "cities" will be very muchlike World's Fairs—places in which to show off newtechnology, not places of work or residence. Theywill be preserved, museumlike, as living monu-ments to the railway era. If we were to dispose ofthe city now, future societies would reconstructthem, like so-many Williamsburgs.

the results are startling and effective. The peren-nial quest for involvement, fill-in, takes many forms.

The stars are so big,The Earth is so small,

Stay as you are.

enviro

Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.

The Fairmount Water Works in Philadelphia, Penna. We impose theform of the old on the content of the new. The malady lingers on.

nment

The poet, the artist, the sleuth —whoever sharpensour perception tends to be antisocial; rarely "well-adjusted," he cannot go along with currents andtrends. A strange bond often exists among anti-social types in their power to see environmentsas they really are. This need to interface, to con-front environments with a certain antisocial power,is manifest in the famous story, "The Emperor'sNew Clothes." "Well-adjusted" courtiers, havingvested interests, saw the Emperor as beautifullyappointed. The "antisocial" brat, unaccustomed tothe old environment, clearly saw that the Emperor"ain't got nothin' on." The new environment wasclearly visible to him.

Sneed Martin, Larson E. Whipsnade, ChesterSnavely, A. Pismo Clam, J. P. Pinkerton Snoop-ington, Mahatma Kane Jeeves-he was always theman on the flying trapeze. On the stage, on thesilver screen, all through his life, he swung betweenthe ridiculous and the sublime, using humor asa probe.

Humor as a system of communications and as aprobe of our environment—of what's really goingon—affords us our most appealing anti-environ-mental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in imme-diate experience, and is often the best guide tochanging perceptions. Older societies thrived onpurely literary plots. They demanded story lines.Today's humor, on the contrary, has no story line-no sequence. It is usually a compressed overlayof stories.

amateur"My education was of the most ordinary descrip-tion, consisting of little more than the rudimentsof reading, writing, and arithmetic at a common dayschool. My hours out of school were passed athome and in the streets." Michael Faraday, whohad little mathematics and no formal schoolingbeyond the primary grades, is celebrated as anexperimenter who discovered the induction ofelectricity. He was one of the great founders ofmodern physics. It is generally acknowledged that

Faraday's ignorance of mathematics contributedto his inspiration, that it compelled him to developa simple, nonmathematical concept when he lookedfor an explanation of his electrical and magneticphenomena. Faraday had two qualities that morethan made up for his lack of education: fantasticintuition and independence and originality of mind.

Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism isanti-environmental. Professionalism merges theindividual into patterns of total environment.Amateurism seeks the development of the totalawareness of the individual and the critical aware-ness of the groundrules of society. The amateurcan afford to lose. The professional tends toclassify and to specialize, to accept uncritically thegroundrules of the environment. The groundrulesprovided by the mass response of his colleaguesserve as a pervasive environment of which he iscontentedly and unaware. The "expert" is the manwho stays put.

"There are children playing in the street who couldsolve some of my top problems in physics, becausethey have modes of sensory perception that I lostlong ago."

—J. Robert Oppenheimer

92

"The thing of it is, we must live with the living."

— Montaigne

100

The youth of today are not permitted to approachthe traditional heritage of mankind through the doorof technological awareness. This only possible doorfor them is slammed in their faces by a rear-view-mirror society.

The young today live mythically and in depth. Butthey encounter instruction in situations organizedby means of classified information—subjects areunrelated, they are visually conceived in terms ofa blueprint. Many of our institutions suppress allthe natural direct experience of youth, who respondwith untaught delight to the poetry and the beautyof the new technological environment, the environ-ment of popular culture. It could be their door toall past achievement if studied as an active (andnot necessarily benign) force.

The student finds no means of involvement forhimself and cannot discover how the educationalscheme relates to his mythic world of electronicallyprocessed data and experience that his clear anddirect responses report.

It is a matter of the greatest urgency that our edu-cational institutions realize that we now have civilwar among these environments created by mediaother than the printed word. The classroom is nowin a vital struggle for survival with the immenselypersuasive "outside" world created by new informa-tional media. Education must shift from instruction,from imposing of stencils, to discovery —to probingand exploration and to the recognition of the lan-guage of forms.

The young today reject goals. They want roles—R-O-L-E-S. That is, total involvement. They do notwant fragmented, specialized goals or jobs.

We now experience simultaneously the dropoutand the teach-in. The two forms are correlative.They belong together. The teach-in represents anattempt 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 smalland perhaps misleading Red Herring. It really haslittle to do with the teach-in, as such, anymore thanwith the dropout.

The dropout represents a rejection of nineteenth-century technology as manifested in our educa-tional establishments. The teach-in represents acreative effort, switching the educational processfrom package to discovery. As the audience be-comes a participant in the total electric drama,the classroom can become a scene in which theaudience performs an enormous amount of work.

Arnherst seniors walk out on graduation address by Secretary ofDefense Robert McNamara. June, 1966.

107

"The hell of it is those punks pump over fifteenbillion dollars into the economy every year."

Drawing by Lorenz; © 1966 The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.

The ear favors no particular "point of view." Weare enveloped by sound. It forms a seamless webaround us. We say, "Music shall fill the air." Wenever say, "Music shall fill a particular segmentof the air."

We hear sounds from everywhere, without everhaving 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 outsound automatically. We simply are not equippedwith earlids. Where a visual space is an organizedcontinuum of a uniformed connected kind, the earworld is a world of simultaneous relationships.

113

"The discovery of the alphabet will create forget-fulness in the learners' souls, because they will notuse their memories; they will trust to the externalwritten characters and not remember of them-selves ... You give your disciples not truth but onlythe semblance of truth; they will be heroes of manythings, and will have learned nothing; they willappear to be omniscient and will generally knownothing."

-Socrates, "Phaedrus"

Homer's "Iliad" was the cultural encyclopedia ofpre-literate Greece, the didactic vehicle that pro-vided men with guidance for the management oftheir spiritual, ethical, and social lives. All the per-suasive skills of the poetic and the dramatic idiomwere marshaled to insure the faithful transmissionof the tradition from generation to generation.

These Bardic songs were rhythmically organizedwith great formal mastery into metrical patternswhich insured that everyone was psychologicallyattuned to memorization and to easy recall. Therewas no ear illiteracy in pre-literate Greece.

In the "Republic," Plato vigorously attacked the oral,poetized form as a vehicle for communicatingknowledge. He pleaded for a more precise methodof 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 radicallydifferent from what we mean by poetry. Their"poetic" expression was a product of a collectivepsyche and mind. The mimetic form, a technique

that exploited rhythm, meter, and music, achievedthe desired psychological response in the listener.Listeners could memorize with greater ease whatwas sung than what was said. Plato attacked thismethod because it discouraged disputation andargument. It was in his opinion the chief obstacleto abstract, speculative reasoning—he called it "apoison, and an enemy of the people."

"Blind," all-hearing Homer inherited this meta-phorical mode of speech, a speech which, like aprism, refracts much meaning to a single point.

"Precision" is sacrificed for a greater degree ofsuggestion. Myth is the mode of simultaneousawareness of a complex group of causes andeffects.

Electric circuitry'confers a mythic dimension on ourordinary individual and group actions. Our tech-nology forces us to live mythically, but we con-tinue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separateplanes.

Myth means putting on the audience, putting onone's environment. The Beatles do this. They are agroup of people who suddenly were able to puton their audience and the English language withmusical effects—putting on a whole vesture, awhole time, a Zeit.

Young people are looking for a formula for put-ting on the universe—participation mystique. Theydo not look for detached patterns—for ways of re-lating themselves to the world, a la nineteenthcentury.

115EDUCATION

Develop A

PowerfulMemory?A noted publisher in Chicagoreports there is a simple tech-nique for acquiring a powerfulmemory which can pay you realdividends in both business andsocial advancement and workslike magic to give you addedpoise, necessary self-confidenceand greater popularity.

According to this publisher,many people do not realize howmuch they could influence otherssimply by remembering accuratelyeverything they see, hear, or read.Whether in business, at socialfunctions or even in casual con-versations with new acquaintances,there are ways in which you candominate each situation by yourability to remember.

To acquaint the readers of thispaper with the easy-to-follow rulesfor developing skill in remember-ing anything you choose to remem-ber, the publishers have printedfull details of their self-trainingmethod in a new book, "Adven-tures in Memory," which will be;mailed free to anyone who re-quests it. No obligation. Send yourname, address and zip code to:Memory Studies, 835 DiverseyParkway, Dept. 8183, Chicago, I11.60614. A postcard will do.

117

Most people find it difficult to understand purelyverbal concepts. They suspect the ear; they don'ttrust it. In general we feel more secure when thingsare visible, when we can "see for ourselves." Weadmonish children, for instance, to "believe onlyhalf of what they see, and nothing of what theyhear." All kinds of "shorthand" systems of notationhave been developed to help us see what we hear.

We employ visual and spatial metaphors for a greatmany everyday expressions. We insist on employ-ing visual metaphors even when we refer to purelypsychological states, such as tendency and dura-tion. For instance, we say thereafter when we reallymean thenafter, always when we mean at all times.We are so visually biased that we call our wisestmen visionaries, or seers!

Reminders—(relics of the past)—in a world of thePRINTED word-efforts to introduce an AUDITORYdimension onto the visual organization of thePAGE: all effect information, RHYTHM, inflection,pauses. Until recent years, these EFFECTS werequite elaborate—they allowed for all sorts ofCHANGES of type faces. The NEWSPAPER lay-out provides more variety of AUDITORY effectsfrom typography than the ordinary book page does.

John Cage:

"One must be disinterested, accept that a soundis a sound and a man is a man, give up illusionsabout ideas of order, expressions of sentiment,and all the rest of our inherited aesthetic claptrap."

The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all.This puts one in accord with nature, in her man-ner of operation."

"Everyone is in the best seat."

"Everything we do is music."

Theatre takes place all the time, wherever oneis. And art simply facilitates persuading one thisis the case."

They [I Ching] told me to continue what I wasdoing, and to spread

JOYand

revolution."

120

Listening to the simultaneous messages of Dublin,James Joyce released the greatest flood of orallinguistic music that was ever manipulated into art.

"The prouts who will invent a writing there ulti-mately is the poeta, still more learned, who dis-covered the raiding there originally. That's thepoint of eschatology our book of kills reaches fornow in soandso many counterpoint words. Whatcan't be coded can be decorded if an ear ayesieze what no eye ere grieved for. Now, the doc-trine obtains, we have occasioning cause causingeffects and affects occasionally recausing alter-effects.

Joyce is, in the "Wake," making his own Altamiracave drawings of the entire history of the humanmind, in terms of its basic gestures and posturesduring all the phases of human culture and tech-nology. As his title indicates, he saw that thewake of human progress can disappear again intothe night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn cycleof tribal institutions can return in the electric age,but if again, then let's make it a wake or awake orboth. Joyce could see no advantage in our remain-ing locked up in each cultural cycle as in atrance ordream. 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 aneconomic commodity—was practically unknownbefore the advent of print technology. Medievalscholars were indifferent to the precise identityof the "books" they studied. In turn, they rarelysigned even what was clearly their own. Theywere a humble service organization. Procuringtexts was often a very tedious and time-consumingtask. 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 of printing did away with anonymity,fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit ofconsidering intellectual effort as private property.Mechanical multiples of the same text created apublic—a reading public. The rising consumer-oriented culture became concerned with labels ofauthenticity and protection against theft and piracy.The idea of copyright—"the exclusive right to re-produce, publish, and sell the matter and form ofa literary or artistic work"—was born.

123

Xerography—every man's brain-picker—heralds thetimes of instant publishing. Anybody can now be-come both author and publisher. Take any bookson any subject and custom-make your own bookby simply xeroxing a chapter from this one, achapter from that one—instant steal!

As new technologies come into play, people areless and less convinced of the importance of self-expression. Teamwork succeeds private effort.

A ditto, ditto device." " " "

A ditto, ditto device." " " "

A ditto, ditto device." " " "

125

Even so imaginative a writer as Jules Verne failedto envisage the speed with which electric tech-nology would produce informational media. Herashly predicted that television would be inventedin the XXIXth Century.

Science-fiction writing today presents situationsthat enable us to perceive the potential of newtechnologies. Formerly, the problem was to in-vent new forms of labor-saving. Today, the reverseis the problem. Now we have to adjust, not to in-vent. We have to find the environments in whichit will be possible to live with our new inventions.Big Business has learned to tap the s-f writer.

Television completes the cycle of the human sen-sorium. With the omnipresent ear and the movingeye, we have abolished writing, the specializedacoustic-visual metaphor that established the dy-namics of Western civilization.

In television there occurs an extension of the senseof active, exploratory touch which involves all thesenses simultaneously, rather than that of sightalone. You have to be "with" it. But in all electricphenomena, the visual is only one component ina complex interplay. Since, in the age of informa-tion, most transactions are managed electrically,the electric technology has meant for Westernman a considerable drop in the visual component,in his experience, and a corresponding increasein the activity of his other senses.

Television demands participation and involvementin depth of the whole being. It will not work as abackground. It engages you. Perhaps this is whyso many people feel that their identity has beenthreatened. This charge of the light brigade hasheightened our general awareness of the shapeand meaning of lives and events to a level of ex-treme sensitivity.

It was the funeral of President Kennedy that moststrongly proved the power of television to investan occasion with the character of corporate par-ticipation. It involves an entire population in a ritualprocess. (By comparison, press, movies, and radioare mere packaging devices for consumers.) Intelevision, images are projected at you. You arethe screen. The images wrap around you. You arethe vanishing point. This creates a sort of inward-ness, a sort of reverse perspective which has muchin common with Oriental art.

The television generation is a grim bunch. It ismuch more seriousthan children of any otherperiod—when they were frivolous, more whimsical. Thetelevision child is more earnest, more dedicated.

Most often the few seconds sandwiched betweenthe hours of viewing—the "commercials"—reflect atruer understanding of the medium. There simplyis no time for the narrative form, borrowed fromearlier print technology. The story line must beabandoned. Up until very recently, television com-mercials were regarded as simply a bastard form,or vulgar folk art. They are influencing contem-porary literature. Vide "In Cold Blood,"forinstance.

128

The main cause for disappointment in and forcriticism of television is the failure on the part ofits critics to view it as a totally new technologywhich demands different sensory responses. Thesecritics insist on regarding television as merely adegraded form of print technology. Critics of tele-vision have failed to realize that the motion pic-tures they are lionizing—such as "The Knack,""Hard Day's Night," "What's New Pussycat?"-would prove unacceptable as mass audience filmsif the audience had not been preconditioned bytelevision commercials to abrupt zooms, ellipticalediting, no story lines, flash cuts.

" When you consider television's awesome powerto educate, aren't you thankful it doesn't?"

Drawing by Donald Reilly; © 1965 The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.

131

Movies are better than ever!

Hollywood is often a fomenter of anti-colonialistrevolutions.

from

the show business paper:"Ice Boxes Sabotage Colonialism"

Sukarno: "The motion picture industry has pro-vided a window on the world, and the colonizednations have looked through that window and haveseen the things of which they have been deprived.It is perhaps not generally realized that a refrigera-tor can be a revolutionary symbol—to a peoplewho have no refrigerators. A motor car owned by aworker in one country can be a symbol of revoltto a people deprived of even the necessities oflife... [Hollywood] helped to build up the senseof deprivation of man's birthright, and that senseof deprivation has played a large part in the na-tional revolutions of postwar Asia."

is anything

youcan

get awaywith

"The biggest and best woman in the world,"an 82-foot-long, 20-foot-high sculpture, in Moderns

Museet, Stockholm. You can walk around in her.

The Balinese say:"We have no art.

We do everythingas well as we can."Museum curator:

"I wouldn't be seen deadwith a living work of art."

A. K. Coomaraswamy:"We are proud of our

museums where wedisplay a way of living

that we havemade impossible."

The Establishment payshomage to four anti-environmental lads.British Prime MinisterWilson visits the CavernClub in Liverpool wherethe Beatles got theirstart. The museum hasbecome a storehouse ofhuman values, a culturalbloodbank.

Real, total war has become information war. It isbeing fought by subtle electric informational media—under cold conditions, and constantly. The coldwar is the real war front—a surround—involvingeverybody —all the time —everywhere. Wheneverhot wars are necessary these days, we conductthem in the backyards of the world with the oldtechnologies. These wars are happenings, tragicgames. It is no longer convenient, or suitable, touse the latest technologies for fighting our wars,because the latest technologies have renderedwar meaningless. The hydrogen bomb is history'sexclamation point. It ends an age-long sentence ofmanifest violence!

somelike

ithot,

somelikeitcold.

Lights, camera, no action.Hollywood is host toPremier Khrushchev.

138

"Did you happen to meet any soldiers,my dear, as you came through the woods?"

142

The environment as a processor of information ispropaganda. Propaganda ends where dialoguebegins. You must talk to the media, not to the pro-grammer. To talk to the programmer is like com-plaining to a hot dog vendor at a ballpark abouthow badly your favorite team is playing.

" 'See Dick. See Dick protest. Protest, Dick! Protest!'

146

The Newtonian God—the God who made a clock-like universe, wound it, and withdrew—died a longtime ago. This is what Nietzsche meant and thisis the God who is being observed.

Anyone who is looking around for a simulatedicon of the deity in Newtonian guise might wellbe disappointed. The phrase "God is dead" ap-plies aptly, correctly, validly to the Newtonianuniverse which is dead. The groundrule of thatuniverse, upon which so much of our Westernworld is built, has dissolved.

"Only the hand that erases can write the true thing."—Meister Eckhardt

152 "...and who are you?"

"I —I hardly know, sir, just at present—at least Iknow who I was when I got up this morning, butI think I must have been changed several timessince then."

154

"You see, Dad, Professor McLuhan says theenvironment that man creates becomes his mediumfor defining his role in it. The invention of typecreated linear, or sequential, thought, separatingthought from action. Now, with TV and folksinging, thought and action are closer and socialinvolvement is greater. We again live in a village.Get it?"

Drawing by Alan Dunn.; © 1966 The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.

Page 1: A trademark is printed on a raw egg yolk by a no-contact,no-pressure printing technique. Imagine the possibilities to whichthis device will give birth !

Front cover: Peter Moore.1: Eugene Anthony, for Newsweek.2-3: United Press International, Inc.4-5: Peter Moore.9: Anthony Petrocelli, for ArtCarved.15-16: Peter Moore.19-20: The Advertising Council, Inc.21-22: Photo-Peter Moore.23-24: The Art Institute of Chicago.27-31: Peter Moore.32-33: Peter Moore.34-35: Peter Moore.36-37: Peter Moore.38-39: Peter Moore.46-47: General Dynamics, Convair Div.51: The Pierpont Morgan Library.52-53: Formerly Kaiser-Friedrich Museum, Berlin.56-57: Peter Moore.58-60: Chas Moore, Black Star.62: Peter Moore.64-65: Radio Corporation of America.66-67: N. R. Farbman, for Time, Inc.70: Robert J. Day.71, 73: Photo —David Plowden; Painting-

New York Public Library.74-75: Photo-Peter Moore.77: Peter Moore.78: Tony Rollo, for Newsweek.79: Bernard Gotfryd, for Newsweek.80-81: United Press International, Inc.82-83: Otto C. Prinz.86-87: Otto C. Prinz.89: William Woodman.90: Photo-Peter Moore.91: Photo-Culver Pictures.93: Culver Pictures.94-95: Janus Films.

159

96: Ute Klophaus.97: Joseph Stanley.98-99: Peter Moore.101: Culver Pictures.102-103: Wide World Photos, Inc.104-106: Jerrold N. Schatzberg, for Columbia Records.105: © 1965 by M. Witmark &. Sons.

Used by Permission.108-109: Steve Schapiro.112: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston —Pierce Fund;

Glyptotheque NY Carlsberg.115: Memory Studies.116: Peter Moore.118: Bell Telephone Laboratories.119: Harvey Gross —Creative Images.121: Photos-Peter Moore.124: "Hier et Demain," published by J. Hetzel, Paris,

1910 ©. Selection title: "Au XXIX Siecle;La Journee d'un Journaliste Americain en 2889."par Jules Verne —Coll. Claude Kagan.

126-127: United Press International, Inc.129-130: Chas Moore, for Black Star.131: Variety.133-136: Tiofoto Bildbyra.137: United Press International, Inc.139: CBS News.142: MortGerberg.143-145: Wide World Photos, Inc.146: Division of Radio, Television and Audio-Visuals,

United Presbyterian Church in the United Statesof America.

148-149: © 1965, by The New York Times Co.Reprinted by permission.

150-151: United California Bank, Los Angeles,California.

160: Wide World Photos, Inc.Back cover: Yousuf Karsh