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British and American journalism, however, have always tended to exploit the mosaic form of the newspaper format in order to present the discontinuous variety and incongruity of ordinary life.
The students could not for a moment accept the suggestion that the press or any other public means of communication could be used with base intent. They felt that this would be akin to polluting the air or the water supply, and they didn’t feel that their friends and relatives employed in these media would sink to such corruption. Failure in perception occurs precisely in giving attention to the program “content” of our media while ignoring the form, whether it be radio or print or the English language itself.
Again, the book-oriented man misunderstands the collective mosaic form of the press when he complains about its endless reports on the seamy underside of the social garment.
What went into the press was news. The rest was not news.
The press, in itself, presents the contradiction of an individualistic technology dedicated to shaping and revealing group attitudes.
Even in its selection of the newsworthy, the press prefers those persons who have already been accorded some notoriety existence in movies, radio, TV, and drama. By this fact, we can test the nature of the press medium, for anybody who appears only in the newspapers is, by that token, an ordinary citizen.
The owners of media always endeavor to give the public what it wants, because they sense that their power is in the medium and not in the message or the program.
Instead of thinking of doing our shopping by television, we should become aware that TV intercom means the end of shopping itself, and the end of work as we know it at present. The same fallacy besets our thinking about TV and education. We think of TV as an incidental aid, whereas in fact it has already transformed the learning process of the young, quite independently of home and school alike.
The simple and obvious fact about the car is that, more than any horse, it is an extension of man that turns the rider into a superman. It is a hot, explosive medium of social communication.
In fact, the American car did not level downward, but upward, toward the aristocratic idea.
The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
The continuous pressure is to create ads more and more in the image of audience motives and desires. The product matters less as the audience participation increases.
The trend in ads, then, is away from the consumer picture of product to the producer image of process.
Ads seem to work on the very advanced principle that a small pellet or pattern in a noisy, redundant barrage of repetition will gradually assert itself.
Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.
But ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men-of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure. Their mere existence is a testimony, as well as a contribution, to the somnambulistic state of a tired metropolis.
Basically, the reason is that the mosaic mesh of the TV image compels so much active participation on the part of the viewer that he develops a nostalgia for pre-consumer ways and days. Lewis Mumford gets serious attention when he praises the cohesive form of medieval towns as relevant to our time and needs.
The historians and archeologists will one day discover that the ads of our times are the richest and most faithful daily reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.
We think of humor as a mark of sanity for a good reason: in fun and play we recover the integral person, who in the workaday world or in professional life can use only a small sector of his being.
Games are dramatic models of our psychological lives providing release of particular tensions.
Like our vernacular tongues, all games are media of interpersonal communication, and they could have neither existence nor meaning except as extensions of our immediate inner lives.
For as it is the pattern of a game that gives it relevance to our inner lives, and not who is playing nor the outcome of the game, so it is with information movement.
The ostensible program content is a lulling distraction needed to enable the structural form to get through the barriers of conscious attention.
A work of art has no existence or function apart from its effects on human observers.
That games are extensions, not of our private but of our social selves, and that they are media of communication, should now be plain. If, finally, we ask, “Are games mass media?” the answer has to be “Yes.” Games are situations contrived to permit simultaneous participation of many people in some significant pattern of their own corporate lives.
Whereas all previous technology (save speech, itself) had, in effect, extended some part of our bodies, electricity may be said to have outered the central nervous system itself, including the brain.
We live today in the Age of Information and of Communication because electric media instantly and constantly create a total field of interacting events in which all men participate.
Electricity offers a means of getting in touch with every facet of being at once, like the brain itself. Electricity is only incidentally visual and auditory; it is primarily tactile.
Any innovation threatens the equilibrium of existing organization.
The “human interest” dimension is simply that of immediacy of participation in the experience of others that occurs with instant information.
To this end, the artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience, even though the majority of his audience may prefer to remain fixed in their old perceptual attitudes.
Indeed, he became so attached to the sound of his typewriter that, on his deathbed, Henry James called for his Remington to be worked near his bedside.
Typewriters caused an enormous expansion in the sale of dictionaries. They also created the innumerable overstuffed files that led to the rise of the file-cleaning companies in our time.
The typewriter and the telephone are most unidentical twins that have taken over the revamping of the American girl with technological ruthlessness and thoroughness.
Why does a phone ringing on the stage create instant tension?
The fact is that, from the alphabet to the motorcar, Western man has been steadily refashioned in a slow technological explosion that has extended over 2,500 years.
The pyramidal structure of job-division and description and delegated powers cannot withstand the speed of the phone to by-pass all hierarchical arrangements, and to involve people in depth.
It is a truism among jazz performers that recorded jazz is “as stale as yesterday’s newspaper.”
The telephone: speech without walls. The phonograph: music hall without walls. The photograph: museum without walls. The electric light: space without walls The movie, radio, and TV: classroom without walls.
The movie, as much as the alphabet and the printed word, is an aggressive and imperial form that explodes outward into other cultures.
Radio affects most people intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and listener.
For the intensely literate population, however, radio engendered a profound unlocalizable sense of guilt that sometimes expressed itself in the fellow-traveler attitude. A newly found human involvement bred anxiety and insecurity and unpredictability. Since literacy had fostered an extreme of individualism, and radio had done just the opposite in reviving the ancient experience of kinship webs of deep tribal involvement, the literate West tried to find some sort of compromise in a larger sense of collective responsibility.
The transforming power of media is easy to explain, but the ignoring of this power is not at all easy to explain. It goes without saying that the universal ignoring of the psychic action of technology bespeaks some inherent function, some essential numbing of consciousness such as occurs under stress and shock conditions.
Radio will serve as background-sound or as noise-level control, as when the ingenious teenager employs it as a means of privacy. TV will not work as background. It engages you. You have to be with it.
Since nearly all our technologies and entertainment since Gutenberg have been not cool, but hot; and not deep, but fragmentary; not producer-oriented, but consumer-oriented, there is scarcely a single area of established relationships, from home and church to school and market, that has not been profoundly disturbed in its pattern and texture.
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior, especially in collective matters of media and technology, where the individual is almost inevitably unaware of their effect upon him.
A cool medium, whether the spoken word or the manuscript or TV, leaves much more for the listener or user to do than a hot medium.
That our cultural historians have been oblivious of the homogenizing power of typography, and of the irresistible strength of homogenized populations, is no credit to them. Political scientists have been quite unaware of the effects of media anywhere at any time, simply because nobody has been willing to study the personal and social effects of media apart from their “content.”
Likewise, precisely the formula that recommends anybody for a movie role disqualifies that same person for TV acceptance. For the hot movie medium needs people who look very definitely a type of some kind. The cool TV medium cannot abide the typical because it leaves the viewer frustrated of his job of “closure” or completion of image.
That is why the transition from mechanical to electric technology is so very traumatic and severe for us all. The mechanical techniques, with their limited powers, we have long used as weapons. The electric techniques cannot be used aggressively except to end all life at once, like the turning off of a light. To live with both of these technologies at the same time is the peculiar drama of the twentieth century.
