|
Introduction
Marshall McLuhan may have done himself a disservice when he wrote, "The medium is the message." As an alliterative maxim this phrase has enjoyed great mnemonic notoriety. But this same notoriety makes it suspect in academic quarters, and its quality of aphoristic compression provides admirers and critics alike with a synoptic substitute for the body of work which produced it. Thus, it is doubly damned.
To the best of my knowledge, no one is born with a genetic directive to become a physician, dentist, or nurse. These are culturally induced vocations and no culture has ever escaped the consequences of its communications media. This is not always recognized because we are under the impression that we control our media. That we are, and always have been, servomechanisms to our media is an observation seldom greeted with open arms or open minds. But more about this later. First, a little "basic McLuhan."
The Medium Is the What, Charlie?
"The medium is the message" implies that the physical and architectural characteristics of media exert greater evolutionary control over our ideas and institutions than the content we superimpose on them. It is the telephone, not the conversation. The film, not the script. The print, not the prose. All media have "personalities" of their own, which function quite independently of the information or content used to modulate them.1
As McLuhan points out, the electric light is a medium without a message. Only after it is used to spell out an ad, or project a film, does it have any content at all. "This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the `content' of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph."2
If you will consider the suggestion that media extend our senses into the world about us, and that internal interactions among these senses enable us to process external information, then the introduction of a new medium may upset the equilibrium of the existing sensory matrix with a subsequent transition into new modes of awareness and behavior.
New media don't simply add themselves on, like freight cars to a train, but rebuild and reroute the total sensory transportation complex.
To assume, for example, that the use of television for instruction in psychiatry is a modification of the two-way mirror, is like saying that a jet plane is a modification of an ocean liner. Both are transportation media, and the content of each is passengers; but this is where similarity ends.
The "message" of the jet age is the entirely new constellation of international and economic associations it has created; just as the "message" of television in medical education (and elsewhere) is revision of student sensory interaction patterns with subsequent changes in their future performance as citizens, practitioners, teachers, researchers, and so forth, regardless of the specific curriculum content assigned to television.
Hot and Cold Media
McLuhan assigns media into one of two temperature ranges. He describes a hot medium as one that is "well filled with data," and "extends one single sense in high definition" requiring little completion by the user. A cool medium furnishes little information and provokes a high degree of completion and participation.
Conversation, as in a seminar, is cool. The group must become involved. Film is hot. The viewer is given a great deal of information in high resolution
Television is cool. It supplies a low resolution fragmentary mosaic which, as McLuhan points out, "requires each instant that we close the spaces in the mesh by a convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile."3
It makes no difference whether the program content is Shakespeare, Batman, or biochemistry.
Each medium commands a different arrangement of sense ratios. Those who see televised panel discussions as nothing more than illustrated radio are suffering from content-induced glaucoma, a very prevalent syndrome.
The question might arise: What will happen when (or if) we have three-dimensional color television with a resolution of 3,000 lines as compared with the two-dimensional 350 line display of standard receivers?
One answer is that we will no longer have "television." We will have a new medium; and it will generate a new distribution of sensory and behavioral priorities which will arise and operate quite independently of the content the device processes.
What's That Outside the Supermarket? My God, Charlie! It Looks Like An African Village!
Consider the preliterate tribe or society. A self contained oral/acoustic nucleus; intensely intradependent. Everyone was deeply involved with everyone else at all sensory levels. This was a cool, maximal participation environment.
Although scrolls and manuscripts initiated sensory separation, the substitution of an eye for an ear, these early forms were sculptural and textural in execution and often read aloud, individually and in groups. This perpetuated the audile/tactile interplay which characterizes pre-Gutenberg man.
In his Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan cites the following passage: "The British Museum is not divided into soundproof compartments. The habit of silent reading has made such an arrangement unnecessary; but fill the room with medieval readers and the buzz of whispers and mutterings would be intolerable."4
It remained for uniform movable type to create the reading room mentioned above (and all others like it). The printing press excised the remnants of tribal synesthesia in the Western world, specifically. The phonetic alphabet substituted an abstract visual code for multisensory participation. Speech was frozen into high-definition repeatable containers. Information exchange could now be removed from the group mouth-and-ear.5
The private viewpoint replaced assembly interaction; and sight supplanted sound as the dominant sensory extension which the new medium, the printed book, made possible. Uniform print stripped away incentives for auditory and tactile involvement; leaving the visual sense to operate in retinal isolation.
Thus began a period of sensory partition and segmental compartmentalization that began to break down only with the introduction of the telegraph in the mid 19th century.
With the arrival of electronic media, 500 years of subdividing thought and procedure is reversing itself. There may be a communications explosion, but the result is organic implosion: the reconstruction of communal and sensory collectivity. There is centrifugal awareness producing centripetal apperception: the search for a value system compatible with the symbiotic synchronism of our time.
The printing press created the individual, radio created the public, television created the mass, and ComSat is creating the global village. To use McLuhan's paraphrase: "All the world is a sage."
(This cartoon appeared in the original monograph)
Copyright 1967 The Family Circle Inc. Reprinted by permission.
The Etiology of Freakoutitis, a.k.a. "Teeny-bopper, keep off the grass!"
The cartoon above is an amusing allusion to a situation which is far from illusory. Small children, having not been programmed by print technology, find it perfectly natural to get close to the TV screen to facilitate completion of the low-resolution mosaic with its haptic inducements. This behavioral imperative profoundly effects interactions with other media and alters the sensory template the child applies to subsequent situations.
The ability to participate in events at a distance, to remain detached, physically and intellectually, is a print-mediated characteristic quite uncommon in pre-literate or quasi-literate audile/tactile societies or individuals.6 7
By the time the average teenager is ready for college, he or she will have had about 12,000 hours of 'hot" classroom instruction and seen some 17,000 hours of "cool" television. It's a battle of phonetic separatism vs. photon simultaneity. The fixed point of view vs. the plastic panorama. The era of the media temperature gap.
Anyone 20 years of age, or less, belongs to the world's first pure television generation. These young people have been media-machined to very different behavioral tolerances than those of their parents. The further we go into older age groups, the greater the opportunity to have achieved TV immunization by lifetime injections of "hot" media such as print, radio, and movies. As a new medium infiltrates all facets of the existing sensory and social milieu, television viewing is only one means of absorbing the medium's impact.
During the past few years, a number of articles have been published about the difficulties many corporations are having in recruiting first-rank college graduates. This is not surprising. Young adults are reacting to the synergistic resonance of the electrical information continuum which imprints planetary empathy in place of vocational fragmentation. They want immediate roles, not long-range jobs; but business offers them isolated boxes on an organization chart. This is quite incompatible with the simultaneous electrical sensory "field" which blocks the ability to visualize, sequentially, the steps leading to remote goals.
Those who labor to find sociologic syndromes would be better advised to ask a light bulb how it feels to be turned on. Moral judgments are useless. The problem is rooted in the schism produced by the transition from print-mediated insularity to electronically imposed universality.8
Galbraith approached this from another direction when he observed that the desire to become associated with production depends upon the ability of the producer to sustain the idea that his goods are essential.9
But business, having used media (and installment credit) to convince everyone that goods (and money) are equally available to all, has succeeded in convincing the younger generation that it is hardly worth spending a lifetime selling or manufacturing that which seems so easily accessible to everyone. Thus, industry is put in the unique position of gradually underwriting its own dissolution."10 (It might be observed that health care is also approaching the condition of guaranteed accessibility.)
Business (and education) is a linear fractionated mechanism trying to solicit the allegiance of a generation that has received an electromagnetic mandate to legislate a sensory renaissance. Faced with entering a society built upon visual fragmentation, and programmed from birth toward audile/tactile unification, the television generation inevitably exhibits various forms of schizophrenia.11
Optical isolation, pitted against sonic combustion, generates a vicious polarity. We are capable, sometimes, of recognizing this sensory fissure when it exists between, or in, other nations; but we are quite unprepared to acknowledge it in our own backyard.
With no desire to become "something," and unable to become "everything," the hippies have (in society's eyes) become "nothing." The hippies are not engaged in juvenile rebellion -- which is irritating although traditional -- but in sensory revolution, which is subversive and un-American. Finding that electronic media have extended all their senses into the world about them, the hippies have turned inward to amplify the only "electrical" element left: consciousness itself. Enter LSD and friends.
That media can be chemical, as well as mechanical and electronic, is not always acknowledged. We are accustomed to assuming that media are concerned only with content transmission, when their major role is cultural and behavioral transformation.
Artists, however, have long been intuitively aware of the role of drugs as media. Cocteau anticipates our inability to understand this he writes (in 1929): "Opium, which changes our speeds, procures for us a very clear awareness of worlds which are superimposed on each other, which interpenetrate each other, but do not even suspect each other's existence."12
Establishments: Antagonistic Observations About
The original monograph carried a collage of newspaper headlines: "Urge Pope to OK Birth Control" "The Reluctant Celibates" "Parochial Schools Hit By Shortage of Nuns" "Pope Permits End of Latin In Mass"
Deus ex telemachina
Consider the newspaper headlines above. The dynamic cathode icon is running into print-locked traditions with about as much delicacy as a rogue bulldozer. To the extent that any system of codified behavior relies on insular repetition of static ritual, to that extent will it be torn apart and rebuilt, or eliminated. The electronic age has created an aura of ubiquitous omniscience which is relentlessly illuminating those vaults of dogmatic isolation that fundamentalist concepts require for survival. The clergy may hold ecumenical councils, but AT&T is writing the agenda.
Sic transit gloria medicus
Establishment hierarchies of all types are being badly shaken by the electronic gestalt, and organized medicine will be one of those hardest hit; for the health science fraternities have carried the print directive of insular compartmentalization to exceptional heights. As with any highly literate group, procedural inertia provides an illusion of forward motion long after the original propellant has been depleted.
At this point in time, policy decisions are being made by men who, because of seniority, have been cloistered by the Gutenberg quarantine. The ecological implication of media thermodynamics is not in their repertoire.13
A case in point: when the American Medical Association entered the public arena in the fight against Medicare, the collision between articulate, high-intensity Dr. Edward Annis, and the requirements of the low-resolution television web was most unfortunate; a media impedance mismatch. Television demands participation and completion. But Dr. Annis left nothing to be filled in. He and his advisers approached television as an extension of, and supplement to, the printing press. They used it to deliver a JAMA (Journal of the Amer Med Assn) editorial.
When it comes to the public understanding of crucial issues, print-processed professions often exhibit great naivete. They begin by assuming that they are their own best advocates. This delights the membership and asphyxiates the message. In launching the AMA/Medicare battle, 200 thousand physicians were pleased and 200 million people were lost. Had the AMA Board of Trustees engaged Walt Disney, instead of Madison Square Garden, Kerr-Mills might have had a fighting chance.
One of the problems that plagues nearly all professional groups, who try for public understanding, is their tendency to take techniques developed for internal communication and revise them to meet external needs. Thus, they succeed in reaching those who already understand or are eager to be convinced. Like educational television, they reach everyone except those who need education.
When approaching the public, most professional groups have yet to learn that information, and those who produce and employ it, do not automatically constitute an awesome and inviolate union. Voluntary health organizations, however, often handle media quite well, for the simple reason that they must solicit as well as educate. Extracting money develops much greater facility with media than imparting information.
Closed-circuit literate institutions react with Olympian arrogance or paranoid panic if anyone suggests that their media mechanisms be examined beyond the content level. McLuhan has an appropriate observation on this: "It was in this spirit of bulldog opacity that the scholastic philosophers failed to meet the challenge of the printed book in the sixteenth century. The vested interests of acquired knowledge and conventional wisdom have always been bypassed and engulfed by new media. The notion that self-interest confers a keener eye for recognizing and controlling change is quite without foundation."14
To see this last comment in action, we need look no further than the spastic eleventh-hour tableaux staged by the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association. The PMA is, of course, merely the vocal and vulnerable appendage of a symbiotic circle; being a satellite of the drug industry, which, in turn, serves the needs and attitudes of the health professions, which, themselves, depend upon the health industries for much of their information15 and most of their therapeutic armamentaria. It will prove difficult to "reform" one segment in the cycle without changing the entire configuration.
One example of the ability of the electronic age to "play the disk of Western man backwards"16 is found in the cadre of legislative hierophants who revel in the joys of the juicy inquisition; and the most exploitable heretics are those for whom static print submersion has provided an illusion of perpetual insulation against cultural temperature change. In the case of the PMA, this insulation has been remarkably effective in one respect: it has kept the public from arriving at any value judgments other than those propagated by the prosecution.
The entire health-science federation often appears to seek refuge in a Maginot Line. Direct assault is not even necessary. The electronic era may simply bypass the entire structure, and the establishment's investment in pre-electric sequential attitudes is in danger of being wiped out.17
Round and round it goes, and where it will stop everyone knows. Nevertheless, the participants continue twitching robotically to the grotesque fugue for which their instruments have been programmed. Establishment concepts and defenses have a cognosorptive filter which cuts out any wavelengths beyond those generated by print. They are quite tone deaf to the organic overtones of the electronic era. It will prove to be an expensive defect.
As the medieval princes were blissfully unaware that the printing press would eliminate their feudal functions, by providing the source of uniform, repeatable information required to create and sustain nations, so many professional associations (and corporations) seem oblivious to the subliminal mutation capabilities of electronic media. McLuhan again: "Each of these enterprises lacks `literacy' in any medium but its own, and thus the startling changes resulting from new hybrids and crossings of media catch them unawares."18
Wretchetativo electronicum
It's not without some irony that the commercial television establishment seems to have no idea at all of what it is about in terms of juggling the sensory apparatus of most of the civilized world. In a recent speech Richard Salant, President of CBS News, is quoted as saying, "It is our job to report news, not to shape it."19 I have great respect for the CBS News Division, but this statement qualifies for what McLuhan calls "the voice of current somnambulism."
Without the depth-unification imperative generated by television, the civil rights movement, the Peace Corps, and the Poverty Program would not exist (their desirability is not the issue). Newspapers, books, radio, and movies are as incapable of creating these phenomena now as they have been for the last fifty years.
Mr. Salant did admit that (on rare occasions) the presence of cameras modified or aggravated the event in progress, and that national newscasts may have given a few malcontents ideas they didn't have before. But this is like the arsonist who confesses to filling the fire extinguishers with gasoline, but refuses to admit starting the fire. In all fairness, however, we should differentiate between what a man may believe privately and what the machine requires him to say publicly. Executive fringe benefits are among the most ingenious remedies ever devised to cure a man of confusing personal values with corporate propriety.
Several months ago, I watched a documentary telecast of activities in Red China. Yards of film were devoted to mob scenes showing young Chinese chanting Mao's catechism while waving his syllabus. The narrative gave the impression that Mao has engineered some form of malevolent conditioning. This is hardly the case. The pictorial symbolism and musical intonations required for the interpretation of Chinese ideograms generate a need for sensory unification; just as our Western phonetic technology, built upon an abstract optical code, automatically produces sensory segregation. The fact that Mao's writing is the book's content, has little to do with its message: the magnification of tribal synesthesia to national hysteria.
The entertainment side of commercial television is a fine example of McLuhan's observation that "The content of a new medium is always an old medium." The content of entertainment programming is about 95 percent film. Were it not so expensive, it would be quite amusing that TV producers continue to be astonished that hot, well known movie personalities often lay an egg when forced into a TV format, e.g., Jerry Lewis' TV series bombed. For the most part, broadcasting executives remain convinced that TV receivers are little more than electronic movie projectors. It follows (for them) that anyone who has been successful in films should be equally good on television.
To date, association with VHF television stations carries with it a guarantee that only by the most absurd and deliberate abuses can one lose money; and even then it's difficult. As the sole purpose of commercial broadcasting is to make more money next year, than last year, it has not really been necessary for broadcasters to know any more about television than Gutenberg knew about the printing press: except that it works. Radio executives, however, as a result of television, are beginning to learn what sound is all about.
The situation is not helped by the number of established media scholars who, in order to test the effects of TV on human behavior, devise elaborate research schemes which are implemented by obtaining films done for television and projecting them directly onto screens. They might learn something about film, but they will learn nothing about television. The research designs themselves are often astoundingly intricate (controls within controls), leading me to wonder if McLuhan's suggestion that "the specialist never makes small mistakes as he moves toward the grand fallacy" may not be rather appropriate.
In Memorium
Before leaving this section, I would like to insert a brief lament over the fate of the brilliant blueprint by Dr. Bernard V. Dryer outlining a national multimedia plan for continuing medical education.20 I realize now that the report was dripping with self-destruct potential; which was promptly (if inadvertently) activated by the organizations that sponsored it.
What Dr. Dryer called "a cognizant national body" was not only bad news for the existing national bodies (each of whom is more cognizant than the others) but hopelessly incompatible with an organizational alliance for whom change signifies catastrophe, and subdivision and fragmentation are a way of life.
Unified action is possible only when a coalition is threatened from without. When challenged from within, control of an abrasive event is accomplished by exposing it to a process of infinite dissection for which all establishment micropathologists are superbly trained. The source of irritation is progressively encapsulated by staff and study committee mimeograph machines until nothing remains but stacks of interoffice memoranda.
The sincerity and dedication of those involved in this metastatic innovicide are beyond question. But they have no choice. Their actions are quite autonomic. If any national plan becomes a reality, it will either have to fight its way up through the layers of local and regional restraints, or wait until the present power structure is replaced.
Why an establishment inner circle rises up, with Pavlovian predictability, to eviscerate that which is intended for the benefit of its membership is a subject for another time. Suffice it to say that the terminal subdivision in the separation of functions, mandated by centuries of print fractionation, is the ability to act without reacting (detachment in extremis); or, in the case mentioned above, the ability of organization executives to operate quite independently of the actual needs of their constituents. The members, seeing their representatives as extensions of themselves, are no more capable of detecting fundamental neglect than society as a whole is able to see the way electronic media, extensions of their central nervous systems, are manipulating their lives.
I Went To the Library To Take Out A Tool, But All They Had Were Books
One of the first indications that new media are about to alter existing pedagogic procedures irrevocably is found in the description of new media as "supplementary tools." This phrase has achieved the status of a ritual incantation; the consistent recital of which banishes the evil spirits of innovation and insures the speaker and his audience that new media will not require them to do anything new.21 It is vital that we postpone recognition of the unrecognizable: we are supplementary aids to our media.
How well we use media is the subject of considerable debate and study. But concerning our ability to veil the actual effects of media, there can be no disagreement; we have performed superbly. We have manufactured an elaborate semantic anesthesia which effectively numbs our perception while new media continue their radical social and sensory reconstruction.
Even calculated neglect of the role of media in programming our civilization is often preferable to the agony the body of conventional wisdom experiences when probed in this area. But this is rare;for an act of deliberate neglect first requires recognition of the fact that there is something one finds it inconvenient to consider: that media may be up to something other than carrying information. But such recognition is nearly always impossible, "For the dominance of one sense is the formula for hypnosis. And a culture can be locked in the sleep of any one sense. The sleeper awakes when challenged in any other sense."22
It must be admitted, however, that the camouflage we employ to disguise the subliminal significance of our media also has its uses. Without it, we might be deprived of the substantial contributions to new media development being made by those whose ability to function in this area depends upon the sedative assurance that they are merely developing adjuncts to existing methodology. Any suggestion that new media are changing the behavioral priorities of the global sensorium, and the continuity of the entire health science spectrum, is usually greeted with derision or disbelief; depending upon the status of the man witless enough to offer this observation. These reactions furnish a safety valve which prevents conceptual overload.
Innovation must be disguised, initially, as renovation or all will be lost. Homeostatic escalation and incremental awareness are essential to the survival and use of media which were developed quite independently of the health professions. Immunization against donor transplants occurs with media as well as organs.
"But Charlie, I'm not supposed to be on your lap!" said Edgar Bergen.
Nothing is so precious to the conventional wisdom as the conviction that we control the media we develops and use. We control only the content; and that, particularly in matters pedagogic, is often a reflection of the media traditions within which we operate.
In receiving an honorary degree from Notre Dame, General David Sarnoff said, "The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad. It is the way they are used that determines their value."23
Statements such as this have been elevated to the position of celestial revelation. In reality, they illustrate the hardware hypnosis with which literate Western man views his technology. Any attempt to discuss the possibility that we are, and always have been, servomechanisms of our technology is quite unacceptable and conflicts with what Robert Ardrey so aptly calls our "illusion of the central position."24
We can observe that the Romans "served" their papyrus and roads, or that the Indians were subordinate to their horses and canoes. The only way to stop serving one medium is to adopt a new one; which promptly turns the old one into an art form. Something we can work with, instead of for. Television has given film makers new dimensions of freedom; just as the still camera encouraged painters to explore the organic values of impressionism, and Detroit assembly lines have created a legion of antique car fanciers.25
In African Genesis, Ardrey points out that despite considerable evidence that our carnivorous ancestors -- Australopithecus africans -- deliberately selected antelope humeri as weapons, many anthropologists still refer to this astounding cortical mutation under the generic context of tools. It would be interesting to see what might happen if the Secretary of Defense asked Congress to appropriate thirty billion dollars for supplementary tools. This is, admittedly, an extreme case of semantic narcosis, and one hopes that health science education will not find it exemplary.
Conclusion
For those who spend years, if not lifetimes, trying to master the technical and cognitive expertise required to understand media, it's disturbing to be told that they exert influence over our affairs which is quite outside our control. There is also something improper about a media theorist (McLuhan) whose writings don't include a single control group, chi-square, or correlation coefficient.
Letters I have received from several journal editors indicate that the mention of McLuhan's name is sufficient to trigger spasms of petulant anguish. An earlier draft of this paper was not simply rejected, it was repudiated. The editor of one journal, concerned with the visual aspects of medicine, had a particularly inspiring and objective suggestion: "If you have in mind to do another paper, on the fallacies of Professor McLuhan's assertions, or on their irrelevance to the teaching and practice of medicine, then we would be happy to consider it for publication." One does not tell the medicine man that his mask and dance have no effect on rainfall and then expect a cordial reception.
It would seem that McLuhan has precipitously ripped open some deep and delicate nerve tissue. It hurts to be abruptly deprived of the auto-anesthesia with which all media invest our lives. One does not intellectualize sudden pain. One can only howl and hope it will stop. Failing spontaneous remission, the entrenched scholarship provides an inexhaustible reservoir of analgesics.
That I have used McLuhan's work as a thesaurus with which to articulate random opinions and prejudices is obvious enough. For this same reason, I hope that what I've written will not be taken as a comprehensive interpretation of his ideas. I have, in fact, used a cannon for a sniper's rifle. It would be unfortunate if what I've said here should discourage the reader from looking into the original sources.
The following passage seems an appropriate way to end this monograph: "The theme of this book is not that there is anything good or bad about print, but that unconsciousness of the effect of any force is a disaster, especially a force that we have made ourselves."26
REFERENCES
1. Felix Marti-lbanez tells the story of the famous actress Modjeska who, while appearing in London, made her audience weep as she recited multiplication tables in Polish. She was the message, and the content could have been a phone book or restaurant menu. Centaur, (New York: MD Publications, 1958)
2. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), p. 8.
3. Ibid., p. 314.
4. 35mm film projection (horizontal X vertical)
5. H.J. Chaytor: From Script to Print, (Cambridge: Heffner and Sons, 1945), p. 19.
6. According to McLuhan, our phonetic system is essentially a series of meaningless sounds related to meaningless symbols. Speech is the content of phonetic writing, but it is not the content of any other kind of writing. Ideographic and pictographic writings are all snapshots of various life situations and objects. The Gutenberg Galaxy, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), p. 46.
7. McLuhan discusses a paper by John Wilson, "Film Literacy in Africa," (Canadian Communications, Summer 1961): "Rather they "Africans] scan objects and images...segment by segment. Thus, they have no detached point of view. They are wholly with the object. They go emphatically into it. The eye is not used in perspective, but tactually as it were. Euclidean spaces, depending on separation of sight from touch and sound, are not known to them." Gutenberg Galaxy, p. 37.
8. A world-wide study of the art of children (5 years of age and under) indicates that children everywhere reproduce objects with archetypal similarity, closely resembling prehistoric cave drawings in form and style. Only after instruction in their indigenous orthographic systems, does childhood art begin to differ. Only those children taught via the phonetic alphabet will develop what we consider a "natural" ability to conceptualize three-dimensional perspective. Rhoda Kellogg: The Psychology of Childrens' Art, (New York: Random House, 1967).See also. Gutenberg Galaxy. p. 40. 9. See also, Understanding Media, p. 335.
10. John Kenneth Galbraith: The Affluent Society, (New York: Mentor Books, 1958), p. 147.
11. The Advertising Council of the Association of National Advertisers is launching a national ad campaign to attract students to business. A typical headline: "It's Mal MacDougal's job to move 40 families out of rat infested tenements. Is Mal a social worker? No, a business man." (The New York Times, Oct. 31, 1967, p. 72.) This is industry's answer to Peace Corps depth involvement.
12. See also, Gutenberg Galaxy, p. 22.
13. Jean Cocteau: Opium: The Diary of a Cure, (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 8.
14. "The technology and social effects of typography incline us to abstain from noting interplay and, as it were, 'formal' causality, both in our inner and external lives. Print exists by virtue of the static separation of functions and fosters a mentality that gradually resists any but a separative and compartmentalizing, or specialist, outlook." Gutenberg Galaxy, p. 126.
15. Understanding Media, p. 195.
16. I refer here not only to direct mail and pharmaceutical l sales forces, but advertising support of journals plus revenue from commercial exhibits at meetings.
17. Understanding Media, p. 86.
18. See also, ibid., p. 248. 13
19. Ibid., p. 195.
20. Conference of CBS Television Network Affiliates, June 6, 1967.
21. Bernard V. Dryer: Lifetime Learning for Physicians, (Cleveland: Western Reserve University School of Medicine, 1962. Also: Journal of Medical Education, June 1962; Supplement, Part II). Sponsored by the American Medical Association; Association of American Medical Colleges; American Academy of General Practice; American Academy of Pediatrics; American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists; American College of Physicians; American Hospital Association; and American Psychiatric Association.
22. For some interesting details on the early habit of sending printed books to medieval scribes to be recopied and illustrated, see Curt Buhler: The Fifteenth Century Book, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960).
23. Gutenberg Galaxy, p. 73.
24. As quoted in Understanding Media, p. 11.
25. Robert Ardrey: African Genesis, (New York: Dell Publishing Co. 1967), p. 145.
26. The assembly line is an industrial outgrowth of the printing press, which initiated the preference of Western man for the optical and linear assembly of individual elements into precisely repeatable configurations. Henry Ford should have created The Gutenberg Foundation.
27. Gutenberg Galaxy, p. 248.
|
