(A golden oldie)

	Television in a New Light

	Canada is the land of the dew line (distant early warning) 
system. As the United States becomes a world environment, it has grave 
need of distant early warning systems as a way of discovering what's 
happened. Culturally, dew lines are a very valuable device. Two aspects 
of my operation at our Center for Technology and Culture in Toronto seem 
to me of special significance to the future of television. One of the 
things which we discovered in recent months is that in every society, 
every new environment creates an intense image of the old one; the new 
one is invisible. Bonanza is not our present environment, but the old 
one; and in darkest suburbia we latch onto this image of the old 
environment. This is normal. While we live in the television environment, 
we cannot see it.
	I am also mainly concerned with perception - how to see things. 
Apropos of this, someone said the other day that Canada has no classes, 
only the Mass and the masses. Canada was created by rail only a hundred 
years ago, and owes everything to the railway - the joining of French and 
English Canada together was a railway action. Rail is a profoundly 
centralizing power. Now with the airplane and television and radio, 
Canada is coming to an end. A country three thousand miles long cannot be 
held together by rail while putting up with airplanes, radio, and 
television, which are decentralizing forces. Separatism is a simple fact 
of radio and television.
	Radio and television, like electric lights, are profoundly 
decentralizing separatist forces. They give everyone anywhere, whether 
under the ice of the arctic or here, the same information, the same 
space, the same facilities. Anyone who talks about centralism in the 
twentieth century is looking at the old technology - Bonanza - not the 
new technology - electric technology. Our children grow up in a world 
that is integrated electrically, that is, a world in which everything 
happens at the same moment. It's an "all-at-once world" of happenings. 
Then they are put into school rooms and colleges where everything is 
classified and fragmented - where subjects are not interrelated. And they 
really are baffled. This is what Paul Goodman calls "growing up absurd." 
What could be more absurd than to go from an electric, integral world 
into a disintegrated, fragmented, mechanical world of the old 
nineteenth-century technology which we call our school system?
	In the sixteenth century there was a painter known to us all by 
the name of Hieronymus Bosch who painted this same dilemma in his 
"Temptation of Saint Anthony" and other nightmares. The Sixteenth-century 
experience was not unlike ours except that it was the reverse, sort of 
negative to our positive. The old Medieval world of iconographic 
sculptural space was confronted by a world suddenly integrated by visual 
perspective space. So, in the "Temptation of Saint Anthony" you have the 
old Medieval world of strange icons overlaid by the new perspective 
Renaissance world of uniform, continuous, and connected space. To the 
sixteenth-century person, this new world was an outrage because it 
destroyed every known human value. What we now think of as the basis of 
our whole civilization - namely uniform, connected, and continuous space, 
rational space, rational order - was, in the sixteenth century, a 
barbaric intruder into their order. Visual space was considered the 
destroyer of all human order. Now we think of it as the basis of all 
human order.
	When electric circuitry comes into play, it creates not a visual 
space at all, but an all- at-once simultaneous space. Consider the new jokes.
	"Alexander Graham Koloski, the first telephone pole."
There is no concept of space, the joke has no starting line, no 
connection: everything happens at once.
	"What's purple and hums?"
	"Well, naturally, an electric grape."
	"Why does it hum?"
	"It doesn't know the words."
These are totally irrational, not connected stories which our kids love. 
This is the electric world, where everything happening at once is normal. 
It is the world we live in and operate in, but not necessarily the world 
we think in. Our thinking is all done still in the old nineteenth- 
century world because everyone always lives in the world just behind - 
the one they can see, like Bonanza. Bonanza is the world just behind, 
where people feel safe. Each week 350 million people see Bonanza in 
sixty-two different countries. They don't all see the same show, 
obviously. In America Bonanza means "way-back-when." And to many of the 
other sixty-two countries it means a-way-forward when we get there.
	The electric world of separatism produces a world of disease and 
discomfort and distress, which has in turn produced a whole batch of 
jokes. In a wonderful little book, The Funny Man, Steve Allen says, "The 
funny man is a man with a grievance." So, we have the grievance joke - 
The cat is chasing the little mouse and the mouse finally eludes the cat, 
dives under the floor and lies there panting while the cat prowls around. 
After a while everything is quiet. The mouse begins to feel a little more 
comfy and suddenly it hears a sort of "arf, arf, bow wow" sound and 
decides the house dog must have arrived and chased the cat away. So up 
pops the mouse. The cat grabs it, and as she chews it down the cat says, 
"You know, it pays to be bi-lingual." Another example - The president of 
Canadian Shell is talking to the president of American Shell a couple of 
years hence, and the Canadian president is saying, "We must have a big 
personnel integration program and totally reorganize the whole show." And 
the American president says, "Say, who do you think you're talking to, 
white boy?" That is a grievance joke with sort of a double barrel. Humor 
is a profound area of research and social science because it shifts 
around with the shifting area of sensitivity and grievance. Slang too is 
very sensitively responsive to pressures in the environment and thus it 
doesn't last long: when the pressure shifts, the slang disappears - it 
fades out. Slang is a spontaneous and natural behavior which records 
quite deep motivation. Slang, the grievance joke, and the joke without a 
story line all belong to the electric world, where everything happens at 
once.
	The newspaper is like this. Any newspaper is crammed with events 
in which there is no story line, no connection between any two events 
except that which the reader may choose to make. There is a date line - 
no story line. In an electric world the story line disappears quite 
quickly like clothes lines, stag lines, party lies, hem lines, neck 
lines. All forms of lineality disappear.
	Television is a very nonlineal, nonstory-lie form as a medium. 
Any story line that television has is borrowed from other media, like the 
movie which has a natural story line. One of the effects, of course, of 
the influence of television on the movie is that the Fellini world and 
many of the new movies do not have a story line. The interchange of 
influences between television and the movie has been extraordinary.
	When television came in it went around the movie form and the 
movie became an art form. The movie used to be vulgar trash; now it is 
art. Whenever a new environment comes around an old environment, the old 
environment becomes an art form: coach lamps, buggy wheels, and model-T's 
anything. This applies at very high-brow levels. When the machine world 
of railways and industry was new, it went around the old agricultural 
world and turned it into poetry. The whole agrarian world became the 
romantic movement, a great treasure and heritage. Meanwhile the new 
mechanical world was abominated as monstrous. When electric circuitry 
came in, it went around the mechanical world and turned the mechanical 
world into an art form - abstract, nonrepresentative art. Whenever a new 
environment appears it is spotted as the degrading and monstrous thing 
and the old environment, which used to be degrading and monstrous, 
becomes art. When will television become an art form? It is still 
environmental. A simple answer is, of course, that television is not an 
art form because there is nothing around it yet. There will be a moment 
when television will become an art form and everyone will recognize it 
and realize that it is a great art medium.
	The western world organizes itself visually by connective, 
uniform, and continuous space. The oriental world, antithetically, 
organizes everything by spaces, by distances between sounds and objects, 
not by connection. I read the other day a bit of advice to American 
businessmen confronting Japanese clients: when you sit down with your 
client, state your business in  just a simple phrase and then be silent. 
Thirty-five or forty-five minutes may go by. Say nothing. Every moment of 
silence is working for you, because your client is inwardly meditating 
your problem, your capacity, your pattern. He is deriving huge 
satisfaction from this inward meditation; if you were to make some 
connection between your problem and something else, this would destroy 
the whole show. The oriental works by interval, not by connection, and 
that is why we think he is inscrutable. We cannot visualize what is 
happening. And, in the electric world in which we now live, everything 
occurs by instantaneous little intervals rather than by connections. We 
are orientalizing ourselves at a furious clip. The western world is going 
east much faster than the eastern world is going west. The confusion this 
creates is reminiscent of the Hieronymus Bosch problem. We all see how 
the eastern world is acquiring some of our old nineteenth-century 
technology - tractors and such - but it is not nearly so obvious to us 
why we should be going east. We cannot perceive our own oriental drift 
because it is so environmental as to be invisible. We do perceive their 
western drift, on the other hand, and it does not make us very happy. We 
figure they must be rivals and so we must deal with them as with any 
other rivals - crush them. For ourselves, however, we wouldn't know how 
to prescribe for an illness or distemper such as orientalism in our own 
midst. It is like Alice in Wonderland. Alice was in a world where no 
visual values existed, where there were no connections and no ground 
rules she had ever heard of.
	This kind of world has recently been looked into by Edward T. 
Hall in a really fascinating and relevant book called Hidden Dimension. 
Mr. Hall looks at space as it relates us to one another in social life 
and in entertainment. He has spent a good many years studying the 
distances which people in different cultures use between themselves in 
conversation. For example, there is a space used in North America between 
people that makes it very difficult for husbands to know the color of 
their wives' eyes. If you ask one of them suddenly, "What is the color of 
your wife's eyes?" the chances are he won't know. Now, this has something 
to do with space. Hall has especially noticed that the space used in Arab 
countries for conversation never exceeds eight inches, the reason being 
that the Arab must be able to smell the person he is speaking to in order 
to feel at ease or friendly. If he is unable to smell his interlocutor he 
at once senses hostility. Hall tells this story. "I was sitting in a 
hotel lobby in Chicago watching an elevator for a friend to emerge when I 
suddenly became aware of a strange presence beside me. And this presence 
kept sort of crowding and being somewhat oppressive and boorish and 
obnoxious. And I was determined," he said, "not to heed this character 
and not to be upset until suddenly he was joined by a group of friends 
and I realized with a sigh of relief they were Arabs." Now, he said, "In 
an Arab country any sitting person, any stationary person is fair game. 
You shoot 'em down. Whereas a moving person, as in a motor car or on 
foot, is sacrosanct, inviolate. You wouldn't dare interfere with a moving 
object." In America, if you are sitting still, minding your own business, 
you are inviolate. No one is going to bother you.
	Every new medium changes our whole sense of spacial orientation. 
Since television, our kids have moved into the book. They now read five 
inches away from the book; they try to get inside it. Television has 
changed their whole special orientation to one another and to their world.
	If I were to ask the television industry, "What is the business 
you are really in?" the answer would have to be, "We are in the business 
of reprogramming the sensory life of North America, changing the entire 
outlook and experience of the population." This has nothing to do with 
programs; it has everything to do with the medium. For example, 
television as a medium is a total antithesis of the movie. In the movie 
you sit and look at the screen. You are the camera eye. In television you 
are the screen. You are the vanishing point as in an oriental picture. 
The pictures goes inside you. In the movie, you go outside into the 
world. In television you go inside yourself. The television form of 
experience is profoundly and subliminally introverting, an inward depth, 
meditative, oriental. The television child is a profoundly orientalized 
being. And he will not accept goals as objects in the world to pursue. He 
will accept a role, but he will not accept a goal. He goes inward. No 
greater revolution has ever occurred to western man or any other society 
in so short a time. This profound revolution of sensibility and 
experience came without warning. No one has even noticed that it has 
happened and the effects of it have created all sorts of discomfort and 
perturbation and all sorts of questions from the press, but no 
understanding. The person who sits in front of a television image is 
covered with all those little dots; all the light charges at him and goes 
inside him, wraps around him and he becomes "lord of the flies."
	Let us contrast this; let us go back for a moment to what 
happened to us long ago. There was a time in the Greek world when western 
man was still tribal and still lived almost entirely by ear in the 
Homeric and Hesiodic world of poetry. There is a wonderful book on this 
one, too, called Preface to Plato by Eric Havelock, in which he describes 
this transition from the world of the ear to the world of the eye. He got 
on to this idea of oral versus written culture during his acquaintance 
with Harold Innis while teaching in Toronto at Victoria College. Havelock 
is now head of classics at yale and is the first classicist to have 
written on this subject as far as I know. The book is really concerned 
with how people organized their experience before Plato, before writing, 
and why Plato suddenly took off in the particular way he did in the 
direction of classified knowledge and ideas instead of operational wisdom 
of this Homeric type.
	The modern connection of this subject is the detribalization, 
which occurs in any society, and which is now going on in many parts of 
the world by virtue and benefit of the phonetic alphabet. To detribalize 
people, push up the visual component in their experience to a new 
intensity and the ear component dims down. They become detribalized, 
fragmented people. Owen Barfield has a book on this subject called Saving 
the Appearances, in which he describes the effect of literacy in creating 
modern civilized man with his values of detachment - objectivity. Before 
the alphabet, ordinary society was profoundly involved in its experience. 
Auditory man is always involved, he is never detached. He has no 
objectivity. The only sense of our many senses that gives us detachment, 
noninvolvement and objectivity is the visual sense. Touch is profoundly 
involving; so are movement, taste, and hearing. All of these senses have 
been given back to us by electric technology. Man is becoming once more 
deeply involved with everybody.
	When Oedipus set out the find "Who done it?" in his tribal 
society, who performed this heinous thing that caused all the misfortune 
to Thebes, he began a profound "James Bond" investigation into the 
criminality of the offense, and he quickly discovered "I done it." One of 
the peculiarities, you see, of a totally involved society is that 
everyone is totally responsible. In an electric world you cannot isolate 
responsibility, for many things may be relevant here. Everyone is so 
involved in every aspect of everything because it all happens at the same 
time, at the same moment, by the same technology.
	In Truman Capote's book In Cold Blood, he describes a world of 
involvement in which everybody is the murderer of those people, including 
the author. If there is a real murderer, it is probably the author or the 
reader, one or the other. No one seems to know. There is no question of 
pinpointing and saying "He did it, I saw him. Get him. Punish him." Under 
electric conditions of information it is impossible to say "He done it." 
It used to be possible to say this under the old conditions of 
nineteenth-century classification and fragmentation. You could pick out 
the criminal and punish him, but under electric circuitry where 
everything happens at once - impractical. It is a little like the change 
in the dance floor. There used to be a time when people would dance 
around in a space doing fox trots and waltzes. On the new dance floor 
this doesn't happen. Space has changed. You couldn't ask anybody doing a 
frug or a watusi for the next dance or for any dance. The dancers make 
their own space, their own world. They do not share it with anyone and 
you could not share it with them. This is a new electronic space, which 
the kids understand instinctively and are miming and dancing. It isn't 
necessarily bad. It is just so different from anything we have ever 
known. It is nonwestern. It is noncivilized. It is nonhuman. But it is 
valid. The electric world has its own ground rules and belongs to our 
technology - technology which we have made ourselves. All of the 
technologies that create these new environments are ones which we make.
	Now this brings us back another step to the difference between 
the public and the mass. You hear the word mass used a great deal in our 
world. It is like the difference between the fox-trot floor and the 
frug-dancing space. The public is a world in which everybody has a little 
point of view and a little fragment of space all his own, private. In the 
mass audience everyone is involved in everybody and there is no 
fragmentation and no point of view. The mass is a factor of speed, not of 
quantity. This is literally and technically true. The mass is created by 
speed and everyone reading the same thing or doing the same thing at the 
same time. It is like Einstein's idea that any kind or particle of matter 
can acquire infinite mass at the speed of light. Any minute, trite bits 
of news acquires infinite potential at the speed of electricity. Anything 
becomes momentous at electric speeds. And a mass audience is an audience 
in which everyone experiences and participates with everybody and in 
which nobody has a private identity. So the psychiatrist's couches today 
are groaning with the weight of people asking, "Who am I? Please tell me 
who I am." There is no identity left. At electric speeds nobody has a 
private identity. Don't ask whether this is good or bad. It is an 
inevitable function of electric speeds. Now I don't think that we have to 
be all that helpless; we can do something about it, if we are determined.
	The public, or la publique as Montaign called it, came into 
existence in the sixteenth century with typography. It never existed in 
the Middle Ages and it no longer exists today. Under electric conditions 
there is no public. There is a mass, meaning everyone involved. How does 
one conduct oneself in the midst of a mass of totally involved and 
metaphysically merged entities? Nobody ever asked this question. I 
personally don't find any satisfaction in complaining about it, or in 
congratulating ourselves upon it. This is one of those things that really 
happens: it is a happening. Many people, by comparing or contrasting it 
with some other condition, in some other part of the world or in some 
other time in our own world, may or may not take satisfaction in it, but 
I personally see no basis for that. Montaigne was the first person to 
discover la publique, and he was also the first person to discover 
self-expression. He said in one of his essays, "I owe the public a 
complete portrait of myself." As soon as the public exists, the author 
exists. Until the author exists the public does not exist. They make each 
other. So, when Montaigne discovered the public, he discovered 
self-expression at the same moment.
	Today self-expression is meaningless because there is no public. 
There is only the mass. Anyone who attempts to attach artistic importance 
to self-expression is talking back in the sixteenth or the nineteenth 
centuries and not about our time. The whole complaint about elite art 
versus mass art is irrelevant because it ignores the technologies in 
question. Advertising can be regarded as a profoundly important art form, 
but it is not private self- expression. The newspaper is a profoundly 
important form of expression, but it's not self- expression. Take the 
date line off a newspaper and it becomes an exotic and fascinating 
surrealist poem. The old idea of elite art, which is now obsolete or 
useless, was that it was a storehouse of values, of self-expression and 
self-discovery, of great moments of individual experience stored up as in 
a blood bank for the use of the community or of the privileged classes. 
Today the whole idea of art is that it is an instrument of discovery and 
perception: that real art, valuable art, offers you the means of 
perception. Flaubert said, "Style, it is a way of seeing." It is not a 
form of self-expression. Conrad said of his whole life's work, "It is 
above all that you may see...That's why I made it." This is the technique 
of perception. Art is not a consumer commodity. It is not a package, as 
it may have been in the nineteenth century. Art is now a way of seeing, 
of knowing, of experiencing a world, of exploring the universe - like 
science. The difference between art and science ceased in 1850 with 
Cezanne. Art, just as much as science, became a technique of 
investigation and exploration of the universe with Cezanne, Bioleau, and 
Flaubert.
	Now, how does one relate art to new media, to television? What is 
the future of art in relation to such a form? Keep in mind that with 
typography and the printed word the public came into existence for the 
first time. Printing was a technique so powerful that it created la 
publique. The manuscript, the handwritten book could not produce a 
public, a reading public or a market for goods or anything else. With the 
uniformly produced, repeatable, printed book came, for the first time, a 
commodity with uniform pricing. Until this time, there was nothing ever 
produced uniformly with a price on it, except perhaps gold or bronze 
coins. With the coming of the printed book you get the market and you get 
the public, and television merges these two entities.
	That backward or distant countries have difficulty in forming 
markets or imitating our way of life need not be baffling. Indonesia or 
India could not possibly have a pricing system until they have had long 
centuries of our type of literacy and uniformity. Without our type of 
uniformity you cannot say "this costs 39 cents." When you say to an 
Indian or an Arab, "This costs so much, it's a fixed price," he simply 
considers this a challenge to his dramatic ability. And so if you try to 
say, "But look, t his is the price and has nothing to do with your desire 
to dramatize your abilities," he will consider himself robbed, deprived, 
degraded. Our pricing system degrades most countries: it robs and 
impoverishes their whole way of life. And don't blame them for going into 
Communism. Communism is the only possible out, just as the PX store is 
the only possible out for people hurrying into uniform production. 
Backward countries don't approach Communism as an ideal, they regard it 
as the only possible means of mechanizing. In this regard, keep in mind 
that when a new technology goes around an old society the society tends 
to idealize its old technology - for example when Russia got our western 
machine world, this drove them back into a furious idealization of their 
primitivism. So you can depend on it. China will have suddenly emerging 
within its borders a huge idealistic movement to glorify the ancient 
China and to downgrade and stamp out all western forms. This is 
inevitable. We did it to ourselves over and over again, and every country 
that ever got a new technology always built up an ideal out of the old 
one. The Romans idealized the Greeks, the Greeks had ideals of 
spontaneity and barbarism. The Middle Ages idealized the Romans. the 
Renaissance idealized the Middle Ages - witness Don Quixote - and the 
eighteenth century idealized the Renaissance. We idealize the nineteenth 
century. That's our image - Bonanza.
	Another hypothesis of mine is that Batman is a nostalgia for the 
world of fifteen-year- old experience, a nostalgia produced by color 
television. Color television is a new environment producing nostalgia for 
an old one. The old one is comic books. The year of the first comic book 
in North America was 1935. So we are due for a little nostalgic revival 
thanks to color television. Color television is also a new technology 
going around the old black-white. It creates a new experience in our 
world and will change the whole sensory life of North America. Color 
television will have many of the effects that color has on other peoples: 
for instance it will encourage them to cultivate very hot spiced foods. 
Color television is a world that effects all the senses, not some of the 
senses: it is not just a visual form. It will change our sense of hearing 
as well as our sense of taste and our outlook. It's quite easy, once you 
know the components of a new technology, to pin-point certain 
developmental results in a given culture. The effect of color television, 
for example, in India would be quite different from its effect in North 
America. It is just the same with radio. Taking radio into Algeria has a 
very different effect from taking it into England. In England the 
auditory sense is stepped up to a new intensity in a culture that is 
highly literate and this has a very different effect from stepping up the 
auditory sense in a culture that is almost totally auditory, like North 
Africa. Television has had a very different effect on France from what it 
has had on us. It has Americanized France; it has Europeanized us. 
Television has downgraded our visual life and values to the point of 
rigor mortis. It has cooled us off the point almost of rigor mortis 
politically. On the other hand, television has heated up the French, who 
are not as visual as we. French television, by the way, has an 819 line 
picture definition as compared to our 525 line definition. If we used 819 
lines, this would help us out of a lot of nasty school problems, right 
now. Our kids would find school easier because if the visual photographic 
level of the medium were pushed up a bit, there would be a bridge between 
their electric world and their school room which would ease their 
problems. I suggest this hypothetically. But there are many reasons for 
saying that it is almost certainly true.
	Another basic fact about our electric environment: it creates a 
total environment like the world of the hunter. Man entered the phase of 
neolithic or specialized sedentary life 10 thousand years or more ago. He 
sat down and began to specialize and weave baskets, make pots, and grow 
crops, and domesticate animals. For many, many ages before that he had 
been a hunter. With electronic technology man becomes a hunter again. 
Hence James Bond, hence the sleuth, hence crime. Crime in our program 
world has nothing to do with television as such. It has very much to do 
with the fact that electronically the whole world becomes a hunting 
ground for information, data. Modern man is the hunter, and crime and the 
sleuth are natural modalities of the recovery of his ancient status. The 
specialist man, the classifier, is not at home in the electronic world. 
The electronic world rubs out all barriers, all partitions, all 
classifications. That is why the existentialist discovers the difficulty 
of having a personality in the modern world. Electrically, you cannot 
have a private personality. It belongs to an older technology of data 
classification: for example, "I'm a Hungarian, I'm a dentist, I'm 35, I 
have three kids, that's me." Under electric conditions that's nobody! 
People have trouble orienting themselves in this new environment because 
no one told them that it has new ground rules; the ground rules are 
always invisible anyway. So, the world of the hunter - our world; the 
nineteenth century - the world of the planter. In our type of world, the 
programming of the sensor environment becomes the normal activity of men.
	At the Center, over the last three or four years, we have been 
working on a project called a "Sensory Profile" of the entire Toronto 
population. We have devised, by the most approved and fragmented and 
quantitative social science procedures, a means of discovering what are 
the sensory preferences of the entire Toronto population. Through the 
speed of learning of our subjects, we have discovered how long it takes 
them to recognize a visual, auditory, tactile, kinetic pattern within the 
same pattern. With all these different sensory ways tied to computer 
measuring devices, we have been able to profile their whole sensory life 
and preferences and also the changes in that life over the past thirty 
years. So we are in a very good position to tell you exactly what 
happened to the sensory life of the Toronto population when television 
came in. We would like to do this study in many other parts of the world, 
because I am pretty sure it is an indispensable resource for decision 
makers in every field. We would like to do it in Greece before they get 
television and then afterwards. We would also like to test the effects of 
other forms on the sensory lives of people of other countries.
	Once you know the sensory profile of a people, how much intensity 
they allow to their visual life or their auditory life, you can just read 
it off as a a percentage of their whole sensorium. Then you can exactly 
program the entertainment, or clothing, or colors, or food, or anything 
for that area. You know exactly what is wanted. While this is neither 
good nor bad, it might terrify some people. They are going to say, "Who 
is going to decide?" This reaction is based upon the old technology of 
fragmentation and specialism.
	When this kind of knowledge comes in, people automatically assume 
new responsibilities. New technologies create new roles and new 
responsibilities. People respond to these, as our children are doing. 
Jacques Ellul, in a wonderful book called Propaganda, mentions somewhere, 
on a page or so, that in the whole history of mankind no child ever 
worked as hard as the twentieth-century child - data processing. The 
amount of information overload in the environment of the child today is 
fantastic. No human being ever had to contend with such amounts of 
information as a daily load for processing. Every one of our children 
engages in a data-processing load that is overwhelming by any human 
standards. So what do they do? They find short cuts. Our children become 
mythic in their whole structuring of reality. Instead of classifying 
data, they make myths. It is the only possible way of coping with the 
overload.
	IBM were the first people who asked themselves the question, 
"What is the business we're really in?" They began to look into it and 
they came up first with negative answers and said, "Well, whatever it is 
we are not in the business of making business machines. That's not our 
business." Further study, much further study, and they came up with this 
answer: "We are in the business of data processing. It doesn't matter by 
what means, that's our business." So, ever since then they have just gone 
like a shot because they have not been worried about the particular 
technology they're using. They know that data processing is permanent and 
it doesn't matter what technology is used - an abacus will do just as 
well as nose counting. They added one other thing - "We are in the 
business of pattern recognition." That's their pet phrase and I think 
this is the business that we are all in - the business of an electric 
society is pattern recognition. Now in regard to a normal activity like 
instruction or education, if you were to ask a teacher, an ordinary 
person, "What is the business you are in?" he would say instruction; 
instructing the young. He would be wrong. The business of teaching is to 
save students' time, not to instruct them. Anyone can learn anything if 
he has enough time. It's the same with the doctor. A doctor's job or a 
hospital's job is not to cure people. It's to cure people much faster 
than they would otherwise get well. It's to save the patients' time. When 
you know your business, it saves a lot of headaches and a lot of 
confusion. And I'm pretty sure that when we realize that a new technology 
completely alters the sensory life of a whole population, we realize that 
the business of most of us is reprogramming the sensory life of the 
population. And when we know this, it creates a new kind of responsibility.
	I've often been struck on the west coast by a strange behavioral 
pattern or personal life style which I try to explain to myself by 
saying, "Well, this is a part of the world that never had a nineteenth 
century." There was no big metropolitan industrial time of highly 
specialized activities with heavy industry and so on. You could say then 
that the people in the west coast area leap-frogged out of the eighteenth 
into the twentieth century, skipping the nineteenth. This is a big 
advantage. The nineteenth century was the period of maximal fragmentation 
and classification. People who leap-frogged out of the eighteenth into 
the twentieth century are more imaginative, more flexible, more 
perceptive than those who went through the nineteenth. The nineteenth 
century was a gristmill that really broke people into little bits. On the 
other hand it created many values that do not exist on the west coast - 
privacy, separateness, neatness, order of all sorts of visual kinds. You 
can see that the environment of parts of California is a tribute to the 
eighteenth-century imaginative life. No nineteenth-century mind would 
tolerate the environment of country left in its natural state. 
Nineteenth-century man would tidy up the trees and the tree trunks. He 
would level the whole terrain. He would give it the good old steam-roller 
treatment. That was the nineteenth century - the century of the iron horse.
	The safety car is an extraordinary indiction of the new mood in 
America. It's the end of an era. The safety car is a way of saying, 
"Look, we're not just interested in the engineering job here. We want to 
know, what does it do to people? What's the effect it has on the people?" 
And the effect is then built into the car. It is like the safety pin. A 
safety pin is made by folding the thing back into itself and clasping it; 
that is how the safety car will be made. Instead of just pointing it out 
at an environment, you fold it back into itself and clasp it. The safety 
car is a revolution. Are we ever going to get any safety media or safety 
science?
	The future of commercial television raises the theme of the 
future of a good many things, including advertising. A student at the 
Center wrote a paper for me the other day on the future of advertising, 
pointing out that it has already got the future written all over it. 
Advertising is substituting for product, because the consumer today gets 
his satisfaction from the ad, not the product. This is only beginning. 
More and more the satisfaction and the meaning of all life will come from 
the ad and not from the product. In an information environment - the 
electric light creates an information environment, so does television - 
the service industries take over from hardware and products. The service 
industries are all informational, like advertising. The future of 
advertising on television is huge because it has to take on the whole job 
of giving you the product and the effects of the product. Advertising 
will be participation in the products, understanding and use and 
satisfaction from them. So the future of commercial television has a 
whole series of questions tied up in it. Don't try to hold it fixed in 
front of you, and continue to look at it as if it were going to stay 
fixed. Television will change totally, just as advertising is going to 
change, just as work is changing. Work is becoming learning and knowing 
rather than repetitive job holding.
	The book, for example, under xerography, is taking on a totally 
different character from the printed book. Xerography means applying 
electric circuitry to an old mechanical process. With xerography the 
reader becomes a publisher and printer and author. Any school- teacher 
can publish her own text for her own class, by taking a page out of this 
and a chapter out of that and handing it out. The publishers know this 
and they are panicking. Circuitry means a total revolution in the book - 
the book becomes a service. Instead of being a package, uniform and 
repeatable, the book becomes a service to suit the needs of the private 
person. Each book becomes a work of art, a private production. Even now 
in Toronto, you can phone the electric information service and say, "I'm 
working on Egyptian arithmetic and I know a little Arabic and I know a 
little French; I know a little this and that. Please send me the latest." 
And they will whisk off a batch of pages and cards to you, Xeroxed and 
reproduced from all the latest journals in all the countries of the 
world. It's a service for the schools. So the book, as a package 
uniformly, repeatably produced is not in electric technology. On the 
other hand, its being obsolescent doesn't at all mean that it's going to 
disappear, it just means that the book will no longer set the ground rules.
	That's the future of television. With cheap playback and video 
playback and so on, the future of television will be very much like that 
of the disc, the LP. Movies will be the same. The future of television 
also relates to the Laser ray and putting the image in multidimension in 
the middle of the room instead of on a panel and so on.
	The future of commercial television really contains thirty or 
forty different questions, the commercial one being one of the most 
illusive because commerce in our world now just means information. 
Management also is just an information service; it is part of the service 
industries. Decision making is based entirely on information, and so is 
medicine. Commerce in our world is taking on more and more of the 
abstract character of information. The future of commercial television 
combines the whole lot of marriages of technologies.
	Now, I will hazard a guess about the future of the planet. It is 
not quite as harrowing as you might suppose. When satellites and electric 
information went around the planet, they created a man-made environment 
around the planet which ended the planet as a human habitat and turned it 
into the content of the man-made environment. The same thing will now 
happen to the planet that's happened to every other environment when it 
becomes the content of a new environment. It will become an art form. The 
future of the planet is camp, an old nose cone. You know the story about 
the two mice in the nose cone. One says to the other, "Hey, how do you 
like this kind of work?" And the other one says, "Oh, well, I guess it's 
better than cancer research." The planet as art form is going to get the 
Williamsburg treatment. All the old nooks and crannies of the planet that 
used to house strange or interesting phenomena and human behavior will be 
reconstructed faithfully, archaeologically, and tenderly. The planet will 
be dealt with as a work of art, you know, where the whole human 
enterprise began. People will come back from other parts of the world, 
other parts of the universe to have a look at Plymouth Rock, which should 
have landed on the Pilgrims, as Stevenson said. And the planet is going 
to become an old nose cone, an old hunk of camp, an old work of art; and 
that then is the answer to television. With satellites, television ceases 
to be environmental and becomes content, becomes art form. As long as it 
has environmental power it is invisible, and as we notice only those 
characteristics of it which belong to the old technology, movies. When 
television becomes an old technology, we will really understand and 
appreciate its glorious properties.
                          

"Television in a New Light" in The Meaning of Commercial Television - 
Stanley T. Donner, ed., University of Texas Press, 1966, pp. 87-107.