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A speedup in communications always enables a central authority to extend its operations to more distant margins.
All organizations, but especially biological ones, struggle to remain constant in their inner condition amidst the variations of outer shock and change.
Any new medium, by its acceleration, disrupts the lives and investments of whole communities.
The steam railroad as an accelerator proved to be one of the most revolutionary of all extensions of our physical bodies, creating a new political centralism and a new kind of urban shape and size.
Metropolitan space is equally irrelevant for the telephone, the telegraph, the radio, and television.
In such society, the separation of the individual from the group in space (privacy), and in thought (“point of view”), and in work (specialism), has had the cultural and technological support of literacy, and its attendant galaxy of fragmented industrial and political institutions.
Our mechanical technologies for extending and separating the functions of our physical beings have brought us near to a state of disintegration by putting us out of touch with ourselves.
The instant character of electric information movement does not enlarge, but involves, the family of man in the cohesive state of village living.
And the intensification of one sense by a new medium can hypnotize an entire community.
The city as amplification of human lusts and sensual striving had
In the same way, the intensification of a single factor in our complex lives leads naturally to a new balance among our technologically extended faculties, resulting in a new look and a new “outlook” with new motivations and inventions.
If people are inclined to doubt whether the wheel or typography or the plane could change our habits of sense perception, their doubts end with electric lighting. In this domain, the medium is the message, and when the light is on there is a world of sense that disappears when the light is off.
Central to modern psychoanalytical theory is the relation between the money complex and the human body.
Currency is a way of letting go of the immediate staples and commodities that at first serve as money, in order to extend trading to the whole social complex.
Apart from communal participation, money is meaningless, as Robinson Crusoe discovered when he found the coins in the wrecked ship:
Money as a social medium or extension of an inner wish and motive creates social and spiritual values, as happens even in fashions in women’s dress. A current ad underlines this aspect of dress as currency (that is, as social sacrament or outward and visible sign): “The important thing in today’s world of fashion is to appear to be wearing a popular fabric.”
Even today money is a language for translating the work of the farmer into the work of the barber, doctor, engineer, or plumber. As a vast social metaphor, bridge, or translator, money — like writing — speeds up exchange and tightens the bonds of interdependence in any community.
The extreme abstraction and detachment represented by our pricing system is quite unthinkable and unusable amidst populations for whom the exciting drama of price haggling occurs with every transaction.
Language, like currency, acts as a store of perception and as a transmitter of the perceptions and experience of one person or of one generation to another.
As the alphabet neutralized the divergencies of primitive cultures by translation of their complexities into simple visual terms, so representative money reduced moral values in the nineteenth century.
From our division of time into uniform, visualizable units comes our sense of duration and our impatience when we cannot endure the delay between events. Such a sense of impatience, or of time as duration, is unknown among nonliterate cultures.
Not only work, but also eating and sleeping, came to accommodate themselves to the clock rather than to organic needs.
In the Renaissance the clock combined with the uniform respectability of the new typography to extend the power of social organization almost to a national scale. By the nineteenth century it had provided a technology of cohesion that was inseparable from industry and transport, enabling an entire metropolis to act almost as an automaton.
It was not the clock, but literacy reinforced by the clock, that created abstract time and led men to eat, not when they were hungry, but when it was “time to eat.”
By coordinating and accelerating human meetings and goings-on, clocks increase the sheer quantity of human exchange.
The truth of a place is in the joy and the hurt that come from it. I had best not put my trust in anything as inadequate as a map, he counseled … I understand now, although I did not at the time, that my airy and easy sweep of map-traced staggering distances belittled the journeys he had measured on tired feet.
It would seem that the logic of success in this matter is the ultimate retirement of the work force from the scene of toil. In a word, automation. If this, however, has been the motive behind all of our human technologies, it does not follow that we are prepared to accept the consequences.
Where does this leave the older popular comics? What about “Blondie” and “Bringing Up Father”? Theirs was a pastoral world of primal innocence from which young America has clearly graduated. There was still adolescence in those days, and there were still remote ideals and private dreams, and visualizable goals, rather than vigorous and ever-present corporate postures for group participation.
Electric means of moving of information are altering our typographic culture as sharply as print modified medieval manuscript and scholastic culture.
Socially, the typographic extension of man brought in nationalism, industrialism, mass markets, and universal literacy and education.
The same spirit of private enterprise that emboldened authors and artists to cultivate self-expression led other men to create giant corporations, both military and commercial.
Typography was no more an addition to the scribal art than the motorcar was an addition to the horse.
The tribe, an extended form of a family of blood relatives, is exploded by print, and is replaced by an association of men homogeneously trained to be individuals.
To extend our bodily postures and motions into new materials, by way of amplification, is a constant drive for more power.
The transformations of technology have the character of organic evolution because all technologies are extensions of our physical being.
Every technology creates new stresses and needs in the human beings who have engendered it.
Walls are made of uniformly fragmented bricks that arise with specialisms and bureaucracies. They are the deadly enemies of integral beings like eggs. Humpty-Dumpty met the challenge of the wall with a spectacular collapse.
An airline executive who is much aware of the implosive character of world aviation asked a corresponding executive of each airline in the world to send him a pebble from outside his office. His idea was to build a little cairn of pebbles from all parts of the world. When asked, “So what?” he said that in one spot one could touch every part of the world because of aviation.
To the student of media, the fact that “normal” right-side-up vision is a translation from one sense into another is a helpful hint about the kinds of activity of distortion and translation that any language or culture induces in all of us.
Each development of the electric age attracts, and demands, a high degree of producer-orientation.
Education is ideally civil defense against media fall-out. Yet Western man has had, so far, no education or equipment for meeting any of the new media on their own terms. Literate man is not only numb and vague in the presence of film or photo, but he intensifies his ineptness by a defensive arrogance and condescension to “pop kulch” and “mass entertainment.”
Of course the photograph does both. It wipes out our national frontiers and cultural barriers, and involves us in The Family of Man, regardless of any particular point of view.
To see a photograph of the local slum makes the condition unbearable. The mere matching of the picture with reality provides a new motive for change, as it does a new motive for travel.
Moreover, the photograph has reversed the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.
In the same way, the tourist who arrives at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or the Grand Canyon of Arizona, can now merely check his reactions to something with which he has long been familiar, and take his own pictures of the same.
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values.
Even the inner life of the feelings and emotions began to be structured and ordered and analyzed according to separate pictorial landscapes, as Christopher Hussey explained in his fascinating study of The Picturesque.
For media, as extensions of our physical and nervous systems, constitute a world of biochemical interactions that must ever seek new equilibrium as new extensions occur.
Whereas the spectator of a picture magazine is passive, the reader of a news magazine becomes much involved in the making of meanings for the corporate image. Thus the TV habit of involvement in mosaic image has greatly strengthened the appeal of these news magazines, but at the same time has diminished the appeal of the older pictorial feature magazines.
The book arrived in western Europe long before the newspaper; but Russia and middle Europe developed the book and newspaper almost together, with the result that they have never unscrambled the two forms.
