Interview with Marshall McLuhan

NORDEN:  To borrow Henry Gibson's oft-repeated one-line 
poem on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In -- "Marshall McLuhan, 
what are you doin'?"

McLUHAN:  Sometimes I wonder. I'm making explorations. I 
don't know where they're going to take me. My work is 
designed for the pragmatic purpose of trying to understand 
our technological environment and its psychic and social 
consequences. But my books constitute the process rather 
than the completed product of discovery; my purpose is to 
employ facts as tentative probes, as means of insight, of 
pattern recognition, rather than to use them in the 
traditional and sterile sense of classified data, categories, 
containers, I want to map new terrain rather than chart 
old landmarks.

  But I've never presented such explorations as revealed 
truth. As an investigator, I have no fixed point of view, 
no commitment to any theory -- my own or anyone else's. As 
a matter of fact, I'm completely ready to junk any statement 
I've ever made about my subject if events don't bear me out, 
or if I discover it isn't contributing to an understanding of 
the problem. The better part of my work on media is actually 
somewhat like a safe-cracker's. I don't know what's inside; 
maybe it's nothing. I just sit down and start to work. I grope, 
I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out different 
sequences -- until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open.

NORDEN:  Isn't such a methodology somewhat erratic and 
inconsistent -- if not, as your critics would maintain, 
eccentric?

McLUHAN:  Any approach to environmental problems must be 
sufficiently flexible and adaptable to encompass the entire 
environmental matrix, which is in constant flux. I consider 
myself a generalist, not a specialist who has staked out a 
tiny plot of study as his intellectual turf and is oblivious 
to everything else. Actually, my work is a depth operation, 
the accepted practice in most modern disciplines from 
psychiatry to metallurgy and structural analysis. Effective 
study of the media deals not only with the content of the 
media but with the media themselves and the total cultural 
environment within which the media function. Only by standing 
aside from any phenomenon and taking an overview can you 
discover its operative principles and lines of force. There's 
really nothing inherently startling or radical about this 
study -- except that for some reason few have had the vision 
to undertake it. For the past 3500 years of the Western world, 
the effects of media -- whether it's speech, writing, printing, 
photography, radio or television -- have been systematically 
overlooked by social observers. Even in today's revolutionary 
electronic age, scholars evidence few signs of modifying this 
traditional stance of ostrichlike disregard.

NORDEN:  Why?

McLUHAN:  Because all media, from the phonetic alphabet to the 
computer, are extensions of man that cause deep and lasting 
changes in him and transform his environment. Such an extension 
is an intensification, an amplification of an organ, sense or 
function, and whenever it takes place, the central nervous 
system appears to institute a self-protective numbing of the 
affected area, insulating and anaesthetizing it from conscious 
awareness of what's happening to it. It's a process rather like 
that which occurs to the body under shock or stress conditions, 
or to the mind in line with the Freudian concept of repression. 
I call this peculiar form of self-hypnosis Narcissus narcosis, 
a syndrome whereby man remains as unaware of the psychic and 
social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it 
swims in. As a result, precisely at the point where a new media-
induced environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our 
sensory balance, it also becomes invisible.
  This problem is doubly acute today because man must, as a simple 
survival strategy, become aware of what is happening to him, despite 
the attendant pain of such comprehension. The fact that he has not 
done so in this age of electronics is what has made this also the 
age of anxiety, which in turn has been transformed into its 
Doppelganger -- the therapeutically reactive age of anomie and apathy. 
But despite our self-protective escape mechanisms, the total-field 
awareness engendered by electronic media is enabling us -- indeed, 
compelling us -- to grope toward a consciousness of the unconscious, 
toward a realization that technology is an extension of our own 
bodies. We live in the first age when change occurs sufficiently 
rapidly to make such pattern recognition possible for society at 
large. Until the present era, this awareness has always been 
reflected first by the artist, who has had the power -- and courage 
-- of the seer to read the language of the outer world and relate 
it to the inner world.

NORDEN:  Why should it be the artist rather than the scientist who 
perceives these relationships and forsees these trends?

McLUHAN:  Because inherent in the artist's creative inspiration is 
the process of subliminally sniffing out environmental change. It's 
always been the artist who perceives the alterations in man caused 
by a new medium, who recognizes that the future is the present, and 
uses his work to prepare the ground for it. But most people, from 
truck drivers to the literary Brahmins, are still blissfully ignorant 
of what the media do to them; unaware that because of their pervasive 
effects on man, it is the medium itself that is the message, not the 
content, and unaware that the medium is also the message -- that, all 
puns aside, it literally works over and saturates the molds and 
transforms every sense ratio. The content or message of any particular 
medium has about as much importance as the stencilling on the casing 
of an atomic bomb. But the ability to perceive media-induced extensions 
of man, once the province of the artist, is now being expanded as the 
new environment of electric information makes possible a new degree of 
perception and critical awareness by nonartists.

NORDEN:  Is the public, then, at last beginning to perceive the 
"invisible" contours of these new technological environments?

McLUHAN:  People are beginning to understand the nature of their new 
technology, but not yet nearly enough of them -- and not nearly well 
enough. Most people, as I indicated, still cling to what I call the 
rearview-mirror view of their world. By this I mean to say that 
because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of 
its innovation, man is only consciously aware of the environment that 
has preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully visible 
only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are 
always one step behind in our view of the world. Because we are 
benumbered by any new technology -- which in turn creates a totally 
new environment -- we tend to make the old environment more visible; 
we do so by turning it into an art form and by attaching ourselves 
to the objects and atmosphere that characterized it, just as we've 
done with jazz, and as we're now doing with the garbage of the 
mechanical environment via pop art.
  The present is always invisible because it's environmental and 
saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly; thus 
everyone but the artist, the man of integral awareness, is alive 
in an earlier day. In the midst of the electronic age of software, 
of instant information movement, we still believe we're living in 
the mechanical age of hardware. At the height of the mechanical 
age, man turned back to earlier centuries in search of "pastoral" 
values. The Renaissance and the Middle Ages were completely 
oriented toward the preHomeric primitives. We reverse the old 
educational dictum of learning by proceeding from the familiar 
to the unfamiliar by going from the unfamiliar to the familiar, 
which is nothing more or less than the numbing mechanism that 
takes place whenever new media drastically extend our senses.

NORDEN:  If this "numbing" effect performs a beneficial role 
by protecting man from the psychic pain caused by the extensions 
of his nervous system that you attribute to the media, why are 
you attempting to dispel it and alert man to the changes of 
his environment?

McLUHAN:  In the past, the effects of media were experienced 
more gradually, allowing the individual and society to absorb 
and cushion their impact to some degree. Today, in the electronic 
age of instantaneous communication, I believe that our survival, 
and at the very least our comfort and happiness, is predicated 
on understanding the nature of our new environment, because 
unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media 
constitute a total and near-instantaneous transformation of 
culture, values and attitudes. This upheaval generates great 
pain and identity loss, which can be ameliorated only through a 
conscious awareness of its dynamics. If we understand the 
revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can 
anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-
induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves.
  Because of today's terrific speed-up of information moving, 
we have a chance to apprehend, predict and influence the 
environmental forces shaping us -- and thus win back control 
of our own destinies. The new extensions of man and the environment 
they generate are the central manifestations of the evolutionary 
process, and yet we still cannot free ourselves of the delusion 
that it is how a medium is used that counts, rather than what it 
does to us and with us. This is the zombie stance of the 
technological idiot. It's to escape this Narcissus trance that 
I've tried to trace and reveal the impact of media on man, 
from the beginning of recorded time to the present.

NORDEN:  Will you trace that impact for us -- in condensed 
form?

McLUHAN:  It's difficult to condense into the format of an 
interview such as this, but I'll try to give you a brief 
rundown of the basic media breakthroughs. You've got to remember 
that my definition of media is broad; it includes any technology 
whatever that creates extensions of the human body and senses, 
from clothing to the computer. And a vital point I must stress 
again is that societies have always been shaped more by the nature 
of the media with which men communicate than by the content of 
the communication. All technology has the properity of the Midas 
touch; whenever a society develops an extension of itself, all 
other functions of that society tend to be transmuted to accommodate 
that new form; once any new technology penetrates a society, it 
saturates every institution of that society. New technology is thus 
a revolutionizing agent. We see this today with the electric 
media and we saw it several thousand years ago with the invention 
of the phonetic alphabet, which was just as far-reaching an innovation 
-- and had just as profound consequences for man.

NORDEN:  What were they?

McLUHAN:  Before the invention of the phonetic alphabet, man lived 
in a world where all the senses were balanced and simultaneous, a 
closed world of tribal depth and resonance, an oral culture structured 
by a dominant auditory sense of life. The ear, as opposed to the cool 
and neutral eye, is sensitive, hyperaesthetic and all-inclusive, and 
contributes to the seamless web of tribal kinship and interdependence 
in which all members of the group existed in harmony. The primary 
medium of communication was speech, and thus no man knew appreciably 
more or less than any other -- which meant that there was little 
individualism and specialization, the hallmarks of "civilized" Western 
man. Tribal cultures even today simply cannot comprehend the concept of 
the individual or of the separate and independent citizen. Oral cultures 
act and react simultaneously, whereas the capacity to act without 
reacting, without involvement, is the special gift of "detached" literate 
man. Another basic characteristic distinguishing tribal man from his literate 
successors is that he lived in a world of acoustic space, which gave him a 
radically different concept of time-space relationships.

NORDEN:  What do you mean by "acoustic space"?

McLUHAN:  I mean space that has no center and no margin, unlike strictly 
visual space, which is an extension and intensification of the eye. Acoustic 
space is organic and integral, perceived through the simultaneous interplay 
of all the senses; whereas "rational" or pictorial space is uniform, sequential 
and continuous interplay of all the senses; whereas "rational" or pictorial 
space is uniform, sequential and continuous and creates a closed world with 
none of the rich resonance of the tribal echoland. Our own Western time-
space concepts derive from the environment created by the discovery of 
phonetic writing, as does our entire concept of Western civilization. The 
man of the tribal world led a complex, kaleidoscopic life precisely because 
of the ear, unlike the eye, cannot be focused and is synaesthetic rather 
than analytical and linear.  Speech is an utterance, or more precisely, an 
outering, of all our senses at once; the auditory field is simultaneous, 
the visual successive. The modes of life of nonliterate people were implicit, 
simultaneous and discontinuous, and also far richer than those of literate 
man. By their dependence on the spoken word for information, people were 
drawn together into a tribal mesh; and since the spoken word is more 
emotionally laden than the written-conveying by intonation such rich emotions 
as anger, joy, sorrow, fear -- tribal man was more spontaneous and passionately 
volatile. Audile-tactile tribal man partook of the collective unconscious, 
lived in a magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual, its values 
divine and unchallenged, whereas literate or visual man creates an environment 
that is strongly fragmented, individualistic, explicit, logical, specialized 
and detached.

NORDEN:  Was it phonetic literacy alone that precipitated this profound shift 
of values from tribal involvement to "civilized" detachment?

McLUHAN:  Yes, it was. Any culture is an order of sensory preferences, and 
in the tribal world, the senses of touch, taste, hearing and smell were developed, 
for very practical reasons, to a much higher level than the strictly visual. Into 
this world, the phonetic alphabet fell like a bombshell, installing sight at 
the head of the hierarchy of senses. Literacy propelled man from the tribe, gave 
him an eye for an ear and replaced his integral in-depth communal interplay 
with visual linear values and fragmented consciousness. As an intensification 
and amplification of the visual function, the phonetic alphabet diminished 
the role of the senses of hearing and touch and taste and smell, permeating 
the discontinuous culture of tribal man and translating its organic harmony 
and complex synaesthesia into the uniform, connected and visual mode that we 
still consider the norm of "rational" existence. The whole man became fragmented 
man; the alphabet shattered the charmed circle and resonating magic of the 
tribal world, exploding man into an agglomeration of specialized and 
psychically impoverished "individuals," or units, functioning in a world of 
linear time and Euclidean space.

NORDEN:  But literate societies existed in the ancient world long before 
the phonetic alphabet. Why weren't they detribalized?

McLUHAN:  The phonetic alphabet did not change or extend man so drastically 
just because it enabled him to read; as you point out, tribal culture had 
already coexisted with other written languages for thousands of years. But 
the phonetic alphabet was radically different from the older and ricker 
hieroglyphic or ideogrammic cultures. The writings of Egyptian, Babylonian, 
Mayan and Chinese cultures were an extension of the senses in that they gave 
pictorial expression to reality, and they demanded many signs to cover the 
wide range of data in their societies -- unlike phonetic writing, which 
uses semantically meaningless letters to correspond to semantically meaningless 
sounds and is able, with only and handful of letters, to encompass all 
meanings and all languages. This achievement demanded the separation of 
both sights and sounds from their semantic and dramatic meanings in order 
to render visible the actual sound of speech, thus placing a barrier between 
men and objects and creating a dualism between sight and sound. It 
divorced the visual function from the interplay with the other senses and 
thus led to the rejection from consciousness of vital areas of our sensory 
experience and to the resultant atrophy of the unconscious. The balance of 
the sensorium -- or Gestalt interplay of all the senses -- and the psychic 
and social harmony it engendered was disrupted, and the visual function 
was overdeveloped. This was true of no other writing system.

NORDEN:  How can you be so sure that this all occurred solely because of 
phonetic literacy -- or, in fact, if it occurred at all?

McLUHAN:  You don't have to go back 3000 or 4000 years to see this 
process at work; in Africa today, a single generation of alphabetic 
literacy is enough to wrench the individual from the tribal web. When 
tribal man becomes phonetically literate, he may have an improved 
abstract intellectual grasp of the world, but most of the deeply 
emotional corporate family feeling is excised from his relationship 
with his social milieu. This division of sight and sound and meaning 
causes deep psychological effects, and he suffers a corresponding 
separation and impoverishment of his imaginative, emotional and sensory 
life. He begins reasoning in a sequential linear fashion; he begins 
categorizing and classifying data. As knowledge is extended in alphabetic 
form, it is localized and fragmented into specialties, creating division 
of function, of social classes, of nations and of knowledge -- and in 
the process, the rich interplay of all the senses that characterized 
the tribal society is sacrificed.

NORDEN:  But aren't there corresponding gains in insight, understanding 
and cultural diversity to compensate detribalized man for the loss of 
his communal values?

McLUHAN:  Your question reflects all the institutionalized biases of 
literate man. Literacy, contrary to the popular view of the "civilizing" 
process you've just echoed, creates people who are much less complex 
and diverse than those who develop in the intricate web of oral-tribal 
societies. Tribal man, unlike homogenized Western man, was not 
differentiated by his specialist talents or his visible characteristics, 
but by his unique emotional blends. The internal world of the tribal man 
was a creative mix of complex emotions and feelings that literate men 
of the Western world have allowed to wither or have suppressed in the 
name of efficiency and practicality. The alphabet served to neutralize 
all these reich divergencies of tribal cultures by translating their 
]complexities into simple visual forms; and the visual sense, remember, 
is the only one that allows us to detach; all other senses involve us, 
but the detachment bred by literacy disinvolves and detribalizes man. He 
separates from  the tribe as a predominantly visual man who shares 
standardized attitudes, habits and rights with other civilized men. But 
he is also given a tremendous advantage over the nonliterate tribal man 
who, today as in ancient times, is hamstrung by cultural pluralism, 
uniqueness and discontinuity -- values that make the African an easy prey 
for the European colonialist as the barbarian was for the Greeks and 
Romans. Only alphabetic cultures have ever succeeded in mastering 
connected linear sequences as a means of social and psychic organization; 
the separation of all kinds of experiences into uniform and continuous 
units in order to generate accelerated action and alteration of form -- 
in other words, applied knowledge -- has been the secret of Western 
man's ascendancy over other men as well as over his environment.

NORDEN:  Isn't the thrust of your argument, then, that the introduction 
of the phonetic alphabet was not progress, as has generally been assumed, 
but a psychic and social disaster?

McLUHAN:  It was both. I try to avoid value judgements in these areas, 
but there is much evidence to suggest that man may have paid too dear a 
price for his new environment of specialist technology and values. 
Schizophrenia and alienation may be the inevitable consequences of 
phonetic literacy. It's metaphorically significant, I suspect, that 
the old Greek myth has Cadmus, who brought, the alphabet to man, 
sowing dragon's teeth that sprang up from the earth as armed men. 
Whenever the dragon's teeth of technological change are sown, we 
reap a whirlwind of violence. We saw this clearly in classical 
times, although it was somewhat moderated because phonetic 
literacy did not win an overnight victory over primitive values 
and institutions; rather, it permeated ancient society in a gradual, 
if inexorable, evolutionary process.

NORDEN:  How long did the old tribal culture endure?

McLUHAN:  In isolated pockets, it held on until the invention of 
printing i the 16th Century, which was a vastly important qualitative 
extension of phonetic literacy. If the phonetic alphabet fell like a 
bombshell on tribal man, the printing press hit him like a 100-megaton 
H-bomb. The printing press was the ultimate extension of phonetic 
literacy: Books could be reproduced in infinite numbers; universal 
literacy was at last fully possible, if gradually realized; and books 
became portable individual possessions. Type, the prototype of all 
machines, ensured the primacy of the visual bias and finally sealed 
the doom of tribal man. The new medium of linear, uniform, repeatable 
type reproduced information in unlimited quantities and at hitherto-
impossible speeds, thus assuring the eye a position of total 
predominance in man's sensorium. As a drastic extension of man, it 
shaped and transformed his entire environment, psychic and social, 
and was directly responsible for the rise of such disparate phenomena 
as nationalism, the Reformation, the assembly line and its 
offspring, the Industrial Revolution, the whole concept of causality, 
Cartesian and Newtonian concepts of the universe, perspective in art, 
narrative chronology in literature and a psychological mode of 
introspection or inner direction that greatly intensified the 
tendencies toward individualism and specialization engendered 2000 
years before by phonetic literacy. The schism between thought 
and action was institutionalized, and fragmented man, first sundered 
by the alphabet, was at last diced into bite-sized tidbits. From that 
point on, Western man was Gutenberg man.

NORDEN:  Even accepting the principle that technological  
innovations generate far-reaching environmental changes, many 
of your readers find it difficult to understand how you can hold 
the development of printing responsible for such apparently 
unrelated phenomena as nationalism and industrialism.

McLUHAN:  The key word is "apparently." Look a bit closer at 
both nationalism and industrialism and you'll see that both 
derived directly from the explosion of print technology in 
the 16th Century. Nationalism didn't exist in Europe until 
the Renaissance, when typography enabled every literate man 
to see his mother tongue analytically as a uniform entity. The 
printing press, by spreading massproduced books and printed 
matter across Europe, turned the vernacular regional languages 
of the day into uniform closed systems of national languages -- 
just another variant of what we call mass media -- and give 
birth to the entire concept of nationalism. 
  The individual newly homogenized by print saw the nation 
concept as an intense and beguiling image of group destiny 
and status. With print, the homogeneity of money, markets 
and transport also became possible for the first time, thus 
creating economic as well as political unity and triggering 
all the dynamic centralizing energies of contemporary nationalism. 
By creating a speed of information movement unthinkable before 
printing, the Gutenberg revolution thus produced a new type of 
visual centralized national entity that was gradually merged with 
a commercial expansion until Europe was a network of states.
  By fostering continuity and competition within homogeneous and 
contiguous territory, nationalism not only forged new nations but 
sealed the doom of the old corporate, noncompetitive and discontinuous 
medieval order of guilds and family-structured social organization; 
print demanded both personal fragmentation and social uniformity, 
the natural expression of which was the nation-state. Literate 
nationalism's tremendous speed-up of information movement 
accelerated the specialist function that was nurtured by phonetic 
literacy and nourished by Gutenberg, and rendered obsolete 
such generalist encyclopedic figures as Benvenuto Cellini, the 
goldsmith-cum-condottiere-cum-painter-cum-sculptor-cum-writer; 
it was the Renaissance that destroyed Renaissance Man. 

NORDEN:  Why do you feel that Gutenberg also laid the 
groundwork for the Industrial Revolution?

McLUHAN:  The two go hand in hand. Printing, remember, was the 
first mechanization of a complex handicraft; by creating an 
analytic sequence of step-by-step process, it became the blueprint 
of all mechanization to follow. The most important quality of print 
is its repeatability; it is a visual statement that can be reproduced 
indefinitely, and repeatability is the root of the mechanical principle 
that has transformed the world since Gutenberg. Typography, by 
producing the first uniformly repeatable commodity, also created 
Henry Ford, the first assembly line and the first mass production. 
Movable type was archetype and prototype for all subsequent 
industrial development. Without phonetic literacy and the 
printing press, modern industrialism would be impossible. It is 
necessary to recognize literacy as typographic technology, shaping 
not only production and marketing procedures but all other areas of 
life, from education to city planning.

NORDEN:  You seem to be contending that practically every aspect of 
modern life is a direct consequence of Gutenberg's invention of the 
printing press.

McLUHAN:  Every aspect of Western mechanical culture was shaped 
by print technology, but the modern age is the age of the electric 
media, which forge environments and cultures antithetical consumer 
society derived from print. Print tore man out of his traditional 
cultural matrix while showing him how to pile individual upon 
individual into a massive agglomeration of nation and industrial 
power, and the typographic trance of the West has endured until 
today, when the electronic media are at last demesmerizing us. 
The Gutenberg Galaxy is being eclipsed by the constellation of 
Marconi.

NORDEN:  You've discussed that constellation in general terms, but 
what precisely are the electric media that you contend have supplanted 
the old mechanical technology?

McLUHAN:  The electric media are the telegraph, radio, films, telephone, 
computer and television, all of which have not only extended a single 
sense or function as the old mechanical media did -- i.e., the wheel as 
an extension of the foot, clothing as an extension of the skin, the 
phonetic alphabet as an extension of the eye -- but have enhanced and 
externalized our entire central nervous systems, thus transforming all 
aspects of our social and psychic existence. The use of the electronic 
media constitutes a break boundary between fragmented Gutenberg man 
and integral man, just as phonetic literacy was a break boundary between 
oral-tribal man and visual man.

  In fact, today we can look back at 3000 years of differing degrees 
of visualization, atomization and mechanization and at last recognize 
the mechanical age as an interlude between two great organic ears of 
culture. The age of print, which held sway from approximately 1500 to 
1900, had its obituary tapped out by the telegraph, the first of the 
new electric media, and further obsequies were registered by the 
perception of "curved space" and non-Euclidean mathematics in the 
early years of the century, which revived tribal man's discontinuous 
timespace concepts -- and which even Spengler dimly perceived as the 
death knell of Western literate values. The development of telephone, 
radio, film, television and the computer have driven further nails 
into the coffin. Today, television is the most significant of the 
electric media because it permeated nearly every home in the country, 
extending the central nervous system of every viewer as it works over 
and molds the entire sensorium with the ultimate message. It is television 
that is primarily responsible for ending the visual supremacy that 
characterized all mechanical technology, although each of the other 
electric media have played contributing roles.

NORDEN:  But isn't television itself a primarily visual medium?

McLUHAN:  No, it's quite the opposite, although the idea that TV is 
a visual extension is an understandable mistake. Unlike film or 
photograph, television is primarily an extension of the sense of 
touch rather than of sight and it is the tactile sense that demands 
the greatest    interplay of all the senses. The secret of TV's 
tactile power is that the video image is only of low intensity or 
definition and thus, unlike either photograph or film, offers no 
detailed information about specific objects but instead involves 
the active participation of the viewer. The TV image is a mosaic 
mesh not only of horizontal lines but of millions of tiny dots, 
of which the viewer is physiologically able to pick up only 50 or 
60 from which he shapes the image; thus he is constantly filling 
in vague and blurry images, bringing himself into indepth involvement 
with the screen and acting out of constant creative dialogue with 
the iconoscope. The contours of the resultant cartoonlike image are 
fleshed out within the imagination of the viewer, which necessitates 
great personal involvement and participation; the viewer in fact, 
becomes the screen, whereas in film he becomes the camera. By 
requiring us to constantly fill in the spaces of the mosaic mesh, 
the iconoscope is tattooing its message directly on our skins. 
Each viewer is thus an unconscious pointillist painter like Seurat, 
limning new shapes and images as the iconoscope washes over his 
entire body. Since the point of focus for a TV set is the viewer, 
television is  Orientalizing us by causing us all to begin to look 
within ourselves. The essence of TV viewing is, in short, intense  
participarion and low definition -- what I call a "cool" experience, 
as opposed to an essentially "hot," or high definition-low participation, 
medium like radio.

NORDEN:  A good deal of the perplexity surrounding your theories is 
related to this postulation of hot and cool media. Could you give us 
a brief definition of each?

McLUHAN:   Basically, a hot medium excludes a cool medium includes; 
hot media are low in participation, or completion, by the audience 
and cool media are high in participation. A hot medium is one that 
extends a single sense with high definition. A hot medium is one that 
extends a single sense with high definition. High definition means a 
complete filling in of data by the medium without intense audience 
participation. A photograph, for example, is high definition or hot; 
whereas a cartoon is low definition or cool, because the rough outline 
drawing provides very little visual data and requires the viewer to fill 
in or complete the image himself. The telephone, which gives the ear 
relatively little data, is thus cool, as is speech; both demand considerable 
filing in by the listener. On the other hand, radio is a hot medium because 
it sharply  and intensely provides great amounts of high-definition auditory 
information that leaves little or nothing to be filled in by the audience. 
A lecture, by the same token, is hot, but a seminar is cool; a book is hot, 
but a conversation or bull session is cool.
  In a cool medium, the audience is an active constituent of the viewing 
or listening experience. A girl wearing open-mesh silk stockings or glasses 
is inherently cool and sensual because the eye acts as a surrogate hand in 
filling in the low-definition image thus engendered. Which is why boys make 
passes at girls who wear glasses. In any case, the overwhelming majority 
of our technologies and entertainments since the introduction of print 
technology have been hot, fragmented and exclusive, but in the age of 
television we see a return to cool values and the inclusive in-depth 
involvement and participation they engender. This is, of course, just 
one more reason why the medium is the message, rather than the content; 
it is the participatory nature of the TV experience itself that is 
important, rather than the content of the particular TV image that is 
being invisibly and indelibly inscribed on our skins.

NORDEN:  Even if, as you contend, the medium is the ultimate message, 
how can you entirely discount the importance of content? Didn't the content 
of Hitler's radio speeches, for example, have some effect on the Germans?

McLUHAN:  By stressing that the medium is the message rather than the 
content, I'm not suggesting that content plays no role -- merely that it 
plays a distinctly subordinate role, Even if Hitler had delivered botany 
lectures, some other demagog would have used the radio to retribalize 
the Germans and rekindle the dark atavistic side of the tribal nature 
that created European fascism in the Twenties and Thirties. By placing 
all the stress on content and practically none on the medium, we lose 
all chance of perceiving and influencing the impact of new technologies 
on man, and thus we are always dumfounded by -- and unprepared for -- 
the revolutionary environmental transformations induced by new media. 
Buffeted by environmental changes he cannot comprehend, man echoes 
the last plaintive cry of his tribal ancestor, Tarzan, as he plummeted 
to earth: "Who greased my vine?" The German Jew victimized by the Nazis 
because his old tribalism clashed with their new tribalism could no 
more understand why his world was turned upside down than the 
American today can understand the reconfiguration of social and 
political institutions caused by the electric media in general and 
television in particular.

NORDEN:  How is television reshaping our political institutions?

McLUHAN:  TV is revolutionizing every political system in the Western 
world. For one thing, it's creating a totally new type of national leader, 
a man who is much more of a tribal chieftain than a politician. Castro 
is a good example of the new tribal chieftain who rules his country by 
a mass-participational TV dialogue and feedback; he governs his country 
on camera, by giving the Cuban people the experience of being directly 
and intimately involved in the process of collective decision making. 
Castro's adroit blend of political education, propaganda and avuncular 
guidance is the pattern for tribal chieftains in other countries. The 
new political showman has to literally as well as figuratively put on 
his audience as he would a suit of clothes and become a corporate 
tribal image -- like Mussolini, Hitler and F.D.R. in the days of radio, 
and Jack Kennedy in the television era. All these men were tribal 
emperors on a scale therefore unknown in the world, because they 
all mastered their media.

NORDEN:  How did Kennedy use TV in a manner different from his 
predecessors -- or successors?

McLUHAN:  Kennedy was the first TV President because he was the 
first prominent American politician to ever understand the dynamics 
and lines of force of the television iconoscope. As I've explained, 
TV is an inherently cool medium, and Kennedy had a compatible 
coolness and indifference to power, bred of personal wealth, which 
allowed him to adapt fully to TV. Any political candidate who 
doesn't have such cool, low-definition qualities, which allow the 
viewer to fill in the gaps with his own personal identification, 
simply electrocutes himself on television -- as Richard Nixon did 
in his disastrous debates with Kennedy in the 1960 campaign. 
Nixon was essentially hot; he presented a high-definition,  
sharply-defined image and action on the TV screen that contributed 
to his reputation as a phony -- the "Tricky Dicky" syndrome that 
has dogged his footsteps for years. "Would you buy a used car 
from this man?" the political cartoon asked -- and the answer 
was no, because he didn't project the cool aura of disinterest 
and objectivity that Kennedy emanated so effortlessly and 
engagingly.

NORDEN:  Did Nixon take any lessons from you the last time around?

McLUHAN:  He certainly took lessons from somebody, because in 
the recent election it was Nixon who was cool and Humphray who 
was hot. I had noticed the change in Nixon as far back as 1963 
when I saw him on The Jack Paar Show. No longer the slick, glib, 
aggressive Nixon of 1960, he had been toned down, polished, 
programmed and packaged into the new Nixon we saw in 1968; 
earnest, modest, quietly sincere -- in a word, cool. I realized 
then that if Nixon maintained this mask, he could be elected 
President, and apparently the American electorate agreed 
last November.

NORDEN:  How did Lyndon Johnson make use of television?

McLUHAN:  He botched it the same way Nixon did in 1960. He 
was too intense, too obsessed with making his audience love 
and revere him as father and teacher, and too classifiable. 
Would people feel any safer buying a used car from L.B.J. 
than from the old Nixon? The answer is, obviously, no. 
Johnson became a stereotype -- even a parody -- of himself, 
and earned the same reputation as a phony that plagued 
Nixon for so long. The people wouldn't have cared if John 
Kennedy lied to them on TV, but they couldn't stomach L.B.J. 
even when he told the truth. The credibility gap was really 
a communications gap. The political candidate who understands 
TV -- whatever his party, goals or beliefs -- can gain power 
unknown in history. How he uses that power is, of course, 
quite another question. But the basic thing to remember 
about the electric media is that they inexorably transform 
every sense ratio and thus recondition and restructure all 
our values and institutions. The overhauling of our traditional 
political system is only one manifestation of the retribalizing 
process wrought by the electric media, which is turning the 
planet into a global village.