INSTRUCTIONAL

MEDIA

IS

BOOK

DEAD?

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 a visual environment for mankind. Because native societies don't live in a visual world, they live primarily in an ear world, they don't use their eyes the way we do, and so with the coming of the forms of alphabetic writing and the book, especially with print, the whole of mankind was given an environment-or rather the literate part of mankind was given an environment-that did strange things to their outlook and inlook. With the coming of visual space, or with literacy, man began to live in a world in which the space around himnwas a continuum of connected uniform pattern. In the Middle Ages there was no space to Medieval man that was uniform or connected or continuous. He did not think of the space between him and the next man, or between him and the cathedral as a continuum. This has been thoroughly investigated in our time by various art historians. They are amazed to discover that as late as the 15th Century, people did not imagine that space had any continuity or connectedness. You have heard of Hieronymus Bosch and his horror, "The Temptations of St. Anthony." The temptation of St. Anthony is a horror created by putting two kinds of space together. Bosch takes the old medieval spaces, the old icons, and the old images in their own separate space bubbles, and he juxtaposes them with the new three-dimensional pictorial perspective space of the Renaissance, which was a brand Dr. Marshall McLuhan, communication theorist and author, is currently on leave of absence from the Center for Culture and Technology at the University of Tormonto hold an Albert Schweitzer to Chair in the humanities at Fordham University. The article presentedhere is adapted from a speech before McGraw-Hill Company editors. Reprinted from College and University Business, December 967, Copyright McGraw-Hi.l, Inc. All rights reserved.--R.A.W. new discovery, and by putting the two things together he creates your horror. Eric Havelock in his wonderful book called "Preface to Plato" describes this contrast or this conflict as it occurred in the Greek world. With the rise of pictorial space and literacy, the division of the world of Socrates, the old oral world or auditory world, and the new visual world became acute. It was a division between the corporate man and the private individual man, the detribalized man. With literacy comes detribalizing of the individual. By the same token, with circuitry comes retribalizing, the end of the individual. Under electronic conditions, all the fragmented specialist forms of work merge into roles. With xerography, the reader becomes publisher. In the older, slightly older, period the typewriter enabled the writer, the author, to become publisher. Anything he typed was in a sense published. It did change the forms of writing. It had an effect on the short story and on poetry and on literature generally, and it had a profound effect on the origanization of business energies. But xerography, by enabling the ordinary writer to publish or reproduce anything at all, can add a soundtrack to any book one chooses to photograph. He can add any part of any book to any other book, doing a kind of Andy Worhal montage. The possibilities in terms of flexibility are very much like those of the ancient scribe. In the ancient world, the scribe was publisher and author and reader. All those functions were merged. They weren't specialized. The scribe performed his tasks for the benefits of immediate patrons and the little circle of friends who needed a particular service. With xerography, the book becomes, by tendency, a service for individuals, a tailor-made custombuilt service rather than a uniform manufactured package. This is the tendency of xerog-

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The CLEARING HOUSE

March 1968

raphy. It's the application of electric circuitry to an old mechanical industry. It tends toward the transformation of book into service, a service industry, not for the general public, but for the private person, for the immediate needs of a particular reader, which he can satisfy by going and dialing a telephone number. When print was new, it created a new environment called the public. There had never been a public before printing. There had been readers, little groups, little modules, nuclei here and there, but there had been no public, even in ancient Rome. There wasn't enough power in the technology of the scriptorium to create a public, or a market. With print came public and market. The printed form was the first commodity that was uniform and repeatable. It was the archetype of all subsequent industrial production. With xerography, the reverse seems to go into effect, and the uniform, the market would seem to be threatened; the very existence of a market with a price system would seem to be threatened by this service industry. It becomes as much a service industry as surgery, or could, unless something is done about it, effectively. People have pointed out that there is already a strong tendency among authors to set their sights not on the reading public any more, but on patrons, foundations, State Department, Pentagon. Even poets, apparently, keep these areas in mind in their authorship, or some thoughts, but the public has a peculiar structure. It consists of private individuals, each with a private point of view. The mass created by electronic circuitry doesn't have that structure. It's an all-at-once event. It's a happening. Everything happens at once. Everybody is involved in everybody in "In Cold Blood." When everybody is involved in everybody, nobody is responsible for anything, or everybody is equally responsible, so that the murderer in "In Cold Blood" would seem to be the author, or the reader, but not the people named in the book. Responsibility becomes so diffused and so pervasive that a completely new concept of human relationship is introduced. The mass is a product of not numbers, but speed. When everything happens at once, you have

mass. It doesn't matter how many, as long as they are all the same moment. The newspaper, the telegraph services of a newspaper, creates a mass audience in a sense that everything happens at once. When everything happens at once, you don't have a story line. You have a dateline. In newspaper, there is no story line. The events are totally unrelated to one another except by a dateline. That is a happening. The newspaper was a happening in the fullest sense of the word, artistically, decades before the happenings began to break out in New York, but I think we do have to consider to what extent do we prize these and value the various forms to the extent that we are determined to continue them and to maintain them against certain types of forces of change. The reason that I don't appear to have any strong feelings about these matters is quite simply that these forces seem to me so vast that to have, to merely entertain, a private opinion about their goodness or badness, would be a kind of ridiculous impertinence, but I think that those values associated with the written and printed word should be a permanent part of the human heritage. They give us the means of detachment and noninvolvement in experience which is indispensable to many forms of human achievement. The natural tendency of any new technology is to be given the job of the old one, and this is very true of the computer. It has been set the old tasks of classified data and the recall of classified data. In actual fact, the computer could be a tremendous source of discovery and innovation because recall at high speeds creates an interphase of old knowledge which yields new knowledge. The computer can be deliberately programed to be a means of interphase that will reveal all sorts of new patterns in old forms. It could become an incredibly rich source of new insight. This is the way it works out in "Finnegans Wake." "Finnegans Wake" takes the human language as the great and ultimate computer and storage system of all time and, by a system of punning, recalls, reveals fascinating new forms in the old experiences.