Understanding Me Lectures and Interviews

Predicting Communication via the Internet (1966) By the mid-1960s, McLuhan had made the world aware that television was a medium that held modern man in its thrall in profound ways that did not meet the eye, and he did this in the most old-fashioned way possible by saying it to as many people as he could. On May 8, 1966, This Hour Has Seven Days, a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation TV public affairs program, featured McLuhan in an interview with the journalist Robert Fulford. McLuhan has the novel idea that the teenager of the mid-sixties was a far more realistic, serious, and meditative creature than the teenager of the previous generation, all because of television and its "involving" quality. In this interview McLuhan also accurately predicts the sort of "interactive" communication that has become possible in the past decade via the Internet. *** McLuhan: The planet is going to get a great new processing from the meteorologists and from all sorts of scientific therapists. It's going to be put in apple-pie order so it will be nice to come home to once in a while, back to the old homestead from outer space every once in a while. Fulford: You've been writing about the mass media for a good many years and now you're an object of the mass media. How has this changed your view of it, if at all? McLuhan: Let me instead explain why this has happened, because, if you notice, the mood of North America has suddenly changed very drastically. Things like the safety car couldn't have happened ten years ago. Fulford: Why is that? McLuhan: It's because people have suddenly become obsessed with the consequences of things. They used to be obsessed with mere products and packages and launching these things out into markets and into the public. Now they've suddenly become concerned about what happens when these things go out onto the highway, what happens when this kind of program gets on the air. They want safety air, safety cigarettes, safety cars, and safety programming. This need for safety is a sudden awareness that things have effects. Now my writing has for years been concerned with the effects of things, not their impact, but their consequences after impact. Unlike the fantasy world, the escape world of movies, TV creates the enormously serious and realistic-minded sort of person, well, almost Oriental in his inward meditativeness. Fulford: This is the teenager of today? McLuhan: Yes, he's becoming almost Oriental in his inwardness. Fulford: He's so thoughtful and serious. McLuhan: Yes, grim, whereas the movie generations of the twenties and thirties were a coon-coated bunch of superficial types, had a good time and went to college but not for knowledge and that sort of thing. All has changed. Fulford: And changed because of television? McLuhan: Very much. Television gave the old electric circuitry that was already here, gave it a huge extra push in this direction of involvement and inwardness. You see, the circuit doesn't simply push things out for inspection. It pushes you into the circuit. It involves you. When you put a new medium into play in a given population, all their sensory life shifts a bit, sometimes shifts a lot. This changes their outlook, their attitudes, changes their feelings about studies, about school, about politics. Since TV, Canadian and British and American politics have cooled off almost to the point of rigor mortis. Our politics require much more hotting up than the TV medium will give them. TV is ideal when you get two experts like ourselves discussing TV. This is good TV because there's a process going on of mutual challenge, discovery, and processing. Now TV is good forMcLuhan, Marshall is the author of 'Understanding Me Lectures and Interviews', published 2003 under ISBN 9780771055454 and ISBN 0771055455.