Marshall McLuhan

	The Care and Feeding of Communication Innovation


One of the many benefits resulting from a conference such as the present 
one on 8mm film is the attention which it directs to other media as 
well.  As Lou Forsdale has suggested in an article on 8mm, the emergence 
of this miniature form of film is parallel to the rise of the printed 
book after 2000 years of manuscript culture.  Like the printed book, the 
miniature film is relatively portable and quite accessible for individual 
use.  35mm film, on the other hand, has much in common with manuscript 
culture with respect to expense, unwieldiness, and the institutional 
arrangements needed for its production and use.  It is true that 35mm has 
not been with us for a length of time in any way comparable to the 2000 
years of manuscript which preceded Gutenberg typography.  But the fifty 
years of 35mm have seen far more changes than the 2000 years of 
manuscript culture.  Moreover, more people have seen and more nations 
have been changed in their attitudes and expectations by fifty years of 
35mm than were every modified by the phonetic alphabet in 2000 years of 
manuscript culture.

In noting the characteristics of 8mm as compared with 35mm, it is 
necessary to say that small film releases the whole movie enterprise from 
large centralized action into the relatively private and individual 
sphere, both with respect to production and use.  This means a total 
revolution in movie content.

To get some notion of the scope of this revolution, let us recall the 
more notable changes that occurred when typography released the book from 
the hands of the scribe and the monastery into the hands of the public at 
large.  The public of Dante or Chaucer was necessarily a small group who 
listened to the poets reciting their verses.  Reading publics in our 
sense did not exist.  The situation, then, was not unlike that of the 
composer before gramophone and LP and radio.  That is to say, the 
composer, until this century, depended for his public on a very select 
patronage.  And so, likewise, with the painter until color came to the 
aid of photo-engraving only a few years ago, creating what Malronx has 
called the "museum without walls".

With the access of the public to portable, printed, and inexpensive books 
in the sixteenth century, the writer had a new public and also a new kind 
of relation to his reader, quite unlike the relation which the scribal 
author had to his slow-moving reader.  Let me draw your attention to one 
of the most obvious features of the word as presented by uniform movable 
types to the human gaze.  It is a lineal strip of black and white 
impressions which the reader translates into a subdued kind of speech 
flow.  This uniform flow, quite unlike the manuscript visual experience, 
served to recreate the movements of the writer's mind, giving the reader 
the strong feeling of sharing personally and privately the thoughts of 
the author.  Silent reading was not possible under manuscript 
conditions.  Is it not plain that private, studious use of 8mm film will 
at once create a great variety of new kinds of production and expression 
such as had never occurred to the makers and distributors of 35mm?  Just 
as the printed book could seek a wide range of tastes and interests among 
an every- widening reading public, so with 8mm.  It will be as free as 
the writer of lyrics or short stories or science fiction to seek and 
satisfy the most specialized preferences among the public.

Because of the miniature character of the 8mm image, those who create for 
it will develop new styles of expression for the film medium quite as 
much as the novel developed new and grander scope with the rise of the 
big newspapers around 1800.  The novel changed again in its form after 
the telegraph had reshaped both the press and society.  But with the 35mm 
film, came even greater changes in the novel form, an even greater 
awareness of human interdependence.  Yet the novel shares with 8mm 
suitability for private viewing.

Yet, granting some features in common between film prints and books 
printed from movable type, there are some striking differences that have 
had great effect on reading habits.  Even the relatively low definition 
8mm image presents, shot by shot, an amount of organized information 
which could not be put in a dozen printed pages of a book.  This complex 
and condensed image or gestalt not only strikes our sense as information, 
but is repeated and sustained as knowledge.  Today we note on all hands 
dissatisfaction with the traditional lineal reading process of moving the 
eyes from left to right in lineal sequence.  Speed-reading courses have 
abandoned this process in favor of using the eyes like a movie camera, or 
at least of using them for vertical instantaneous scanning rather than in 
horizontal sequence.  Film has not only altered the styles of the novel 
but has altered habits of perception to a degree that has, perhaps, been 
concealed by the practice of public projection of movies.  Had movies 
reached their 8mm phase sooner, we would have been more quickly aware of 
the meaning of film in shaping our attitudes and outlooks.

The meaning of a medium like film is not so easily noticed by those who 
developed the form, as by those for whom it is an exotic and alien 
thing.  If we wanted to find out the effects of alphabetic writing in 
changing mental processes and sensory processes, we would have to go to 
tribal areas as J.C. Carothers did.  It is quite impossible to know the 
effect of writing and printing in the Western world which developed these 
forms.  In their very growth they assume a cloak of invisibility, just as 
television is doing right now.

As for the effect of the movies on human attitudes, it is easier to 
understand by means of such remarks as those of President Sukarno, which 
Erik Barnouw records in his book on Mass Communication:

			On an ironic occasion in 1956, President Sukarno 
of Indonesia visited Hollywood and, to its surprise, thanked the film 
industry for its aid to the national revolutions of post-war Asia.  By 
showing ordinary people with refrigerators and cars, he said, American 
films had "helped to build up a sense of deprivation of man's 
birthright".  He told the assembled executives:  "That is why I say you 
are revolutionaries, and that is why I salute you.  In a world of in 
equality, you and your products cannot be noncontroversial."

Sukarno is saying that his people first encountered consumer goods in 
American movies.  They were utterly unprepared for such an experience, 
and became very angry.  In the West we have had 500 years of gradual 
accustomation to consumer goods.  That is, beginning with the printed 
book, we set up the process of uniform and repeatable production which we 
have come to refer to as mechanization.  The product of mechanization is 
a consumer commodity as no handicraft product ever is.  It ends barter 
and bazaars, and forces the creation of complex systems, none of which is 
possible for newly literate people, let alone the non-literate.  To send 
movies to such cultures is to drop a 50 metagon explosion on them.  Today 
we ourselves are showing our utter incapacity to face up to the 
post-mechanical forms of industry which we vaguely designate as 
"automation".  The post-mechanical or electronic cannot mesh with, or 
work in harmony with, the old patterns of production, consumption and 
distribution we had worked out slowly for a mechanical technology.  We 
can sympathize with our fellow men who are bewildered by the onset of the 
mechanical technology for the first time in their lives.  We went through 
it centuries ago and are up against a much bigger revolution today.  
Sukarno's words are very significant when he says that in American movies 
his people see "ordinary people with refrigerators and cars".  
Refrigerators and cars are one thing.  Their possession by ordinary 
people is quite another.  Yet the film medium, like the print medium, 
insists on having ordinary people in extraordinary situations.

The very meaning and message of any medium that is uniformly repeatable 
is that it is the same for all men.  Print levelled the feudal system and 
all merely class distinctions more effectively than cannon and gunpowder 
levelled the feudal castles.  Yet, whereas the Indonesian gets the film 
message consciously as one of social revolution, we in North America 
imagine that we are being entertained.  To the Indonesian the image of 
uniformly ordinary folks living in princely style is an invitation to 
make a clean sweep of his institutions.  To us it is merely a mild 
incentive to exert ourselves a little more in order to take advantage of 
our opportunities.

In a recent article on the Economy of Abundance, Gerard Piel, former 
editor of the Scientific American, and presently head of the Fund for the 
Republic, pointed to some of the implications of automation.  Two main 
bulwarks of our Western way of life are in immediate danger of 
disappearance -- namely, property and work.  I am not going to give you 
his technological analysis of the developments which have brought us to 
the very verge of "the oat barrier", as it were.  For whereas we do drive 
horseless carriages, our minds have not really passed the oat barrier in 
1961.  The meaning of Gerard Piel's observation for this 8mm conference 
is the same as Peter Drucker's theme in Landmarks of Tomorrow:  For the 
first time in human history higher eduction is not a privilege nor an 
ornament but a necessity of ordinary production.  In our time the process 
of learning and discovery has become more and more the very business, in 
a commercial sense, of our entire society.  The globe itself is tending 
to become a community of learning.  Our various media today engage more 
people and more capital than all the older forms of heavy industry.  A.T. 
and T. moves only information and is several times the size of General 
Motors.  The packaging and moving of information has simply become the 
business of the global community.  The programming of computers calls for 
levels of human awareness about media and ourselves such as we do not yet 
possess.  But one fact about our new type of global community, resulting 
from our own technologies, has become very plain.  It is stated as 
follows by De Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man:

			Now, to the degree that -- under the effect of 
this pressure and thanks to their psychic permeability -- the human 
elements infiltrated more and more into each other, their minds 
(mysterious coincidence) were mutually stimulated by proximity.  And as 
though dilated upon themselves, they each extended little by little the 
radius of their influence upon this earth which, by the same token, 
shrank steadily.  What in fact do we see happening in the modern 
paroxysm?  It has been stated over and over again.  Through the discovery 
yesterday of the railway, the motor car and the aeroplane, the physical 
influence of each man, formerly restricted to a few miles, now extends to 
hundreds of leagues or more.  Better still: thanks to the prodigious 
biological event represented by the discovery of electro-magnetic waves, 
each individual finds himself henceforth (actively and passively) 
simultaneously present, over land and sea, in every corner of the earth.

It has been hard to accept the organic character of an electrically 
interdependent community because we have for so long saturated our 
perception in the patterns of mechanism and separation of forms and 
functions.  The different ways of life on this planet would afford little 
cause for friction if information still moved over land and sea at the 
speed of the horseman and the ship.

But whereas formerly the great clashes took place occasionally between 
groups geographically separated, there are no longer any geographic 
separations in the electric age.  In terms of our daily knowledge and 
information about each other the human family now shares a very small 
global village.  Our technology has enabled us to put all of our senses 
outside ourselves, with the result that we find our neighbor is inside, 
and not "out there" any longer.  When the senses go outside, not only Big 
Brother but little brother goes inside.

I would like to expand a bit on the theme of our media as means of 
extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.  
Because "the Care and Feeding of Communication Innovation" can be 
discussed in quite specific and practical terms once we understand the 
way  in which telephone and radio are externalized models of speech and 
hearing, or the ways in which the movie camera and projector are 
externalized models of our visual sense.  To externalize and extend one 
of our senses by technology is to give immensely greater stress and also 
capacity to that sense.  Your 8mm deliberations postulate an information 
capacity for the learning process greatly larger than the capacity of the 
eye roving its environment or than the eye scanning the printed page.  
First, let me reassure you that there is nothing new in the notion of 
human technology as abstraction and extension of our physical functions.  
Edward Hall in the Silent Language assumes this knowledge, saying that 
the extension of his body was a form of specialization by which Man from 
the first began to exploit his environment:

			Today man has developed extensions for 
practically every thing he used to do with his body.  The evolution of 
weapons begins with the teeth and the fist ends with the atom bomb.  
Clothes and houses are extensions of man's biological temperature- 
control mechanisms.  Furniture takes the place of squatting and sitting 
on the ground.  Power tools, glasses, TV, telephones, and books which 
carry the voice across both time and space are examples of material 
extensions.  Money is a way of extending and storing labor.  Our 
transportation networks now do what we used to do with our feet and 
backs.  In fact, all man-made material things can be treated as 
extensions of what man once did with his body or some specialized part of 
his body.

I think it is now possible to know what kinds of conditions and change 
make it natural for man to abstract one rather than another sense organ 
at any given time.  Among the many changes of the present we can now, for 
example, witness the obsolescence of the wheel and its reabsorption, as 
it were, into organic form.  The wheel is an abstraction from animal 
running, an abstraction of the form involved in sequential rotation of 
feet.  In the jet and missile age the wheel begins to reamalgamerge, to 
use James Joyce's term for this mysterious kind of retrograde metamorphosis.

Speaking with physiologists and sense psychologists about radio or film 
as abstract artistic extensions of sound and sight, I have been told that 
they can find no objection to regarding such technologies as literal, not 
figurative, extensions of these faculties.  to their knowledge nobody has 
speculated in this way, and they admit that it puzzles them as to just 
why so obvious a fact should have eluded observation.  For they are very 
well aware that the senses never operate in isolation.  If one sense is 
suppressed, the other senses compensate in various ways in order to 
maintain that steady ratio among the senses which is the norm of human 
consciousness.  If one sense is isolated by stress or intensity we are in 
the state of hypnosis at once.  Pushed a bit further, the isolation of 
sense leads swiftly to insanity.  our heartbeat put on a PA system acts 
like the Chinese water torture to send us insane.  The great problem 
confronting the engineers of space travel is weightlessness which 
suppresses the operation of the tactile sense.  This sense appears to be 
the bond among the other senses.

In his classic Study of Experimental Medicine Claude Bernard explains 
that observation does not interrupt functions.  The investigator 
considers his data without disturbing them in their natural state.  But 
experiment implies, on the contrary, a variation or disturbance of 
functions, a cutting out of organs one at a time, precisely to discover 
their functions by noting the consequences for the other organs when that 
particular one is suppressed.

It would seem equally experimental not to suppress but to extend and to 
stress the action of a particular organ, and to observe the consequences 
of its increased activity upon the other organs or senses.  Such 
experiments, men have been carrying out on themselves since the invention 
of the drum and of the written word. But nobody has bothered to observe 
the results on the other sense organs.  Moreover, such experiments have 
been collective, on an enormous scale, far beyond the means or dreams of 
private experimenters, and this must be the inhibiting factor.  For the 
well-known modesty and timidity of scientists, not to mention their lack 
of research funds, would seem to have discouraged them from seizing upon 
so lavish and extensive an experiment as that of radio or of film on the 
human community.  For the technological extension of our faculties, 
completely alters the relation among our senses.  Since the various rates 
of physical vibration which constitute touch or taste or sight or sound 
are quantifiable, the effects of new media, or new extensions of separate 
senses, upon the ratios already typically prevalent among our senses.  
Thus in a non-literate society the eye operates at very low frequency 
compared to ear and touch.  In a highly literate society the 
audile-tactile operation is much muted in favor of the eye.  When the ear 
is dominant man is tribal; and where the eye is supreme the individual 
asserts himself strongly against the group.

Any media which strengthen the role of the eye in in human affairs, favor 
civilization and the Western way of life.  Media which advance the ear 
and the sense of simultaneous field of awareness and action naturally 
favor the patterns of tribal man at the expense of the individual.  Karl 
Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies presents many aspects of this 
dilemma but without any recognition of the role played by media in 
bringing about drastic reorganization of societies and of procedures in 
thought and learning.

A recent and striking instance of a sudden change of diet and care of 
media occurred when the Luce organization made a drastic change in Life 
magazine.  The hard focus photography was changed to low definition or 
soft focus, and along with this change went the shift from picture story 
to mosaic image building.  TV forced this change in Life magazine, just 
as it has rendered the old hot style of Time magazine obsolete.  The TV 
image is the first technology to project or externalize our tactile 
sense.  The externalizing of our tactility has brought great change in 
the ratios between sight and sound.  Sight and sound had reached some 
degrees of stability in relation to one another, thanks to the evenly 
divided empires of radio and film, of press and photography.  The sudden 
project of touch itself changed everything.  The human senses were 
suddenly given an altogether new diet, and a new ratio or proportion 
among our senses was set up as soon as TV began.  We began to get 
sensuous and tactile and wine-conscious.  It no longer seemed strange to 
us that Francois Saigon should drive her car in her bare feet.  Even life 
behind the tweed curtain of the British Isles assumed a certain new 
plausibility as our girls abandoned visual values in attire in favor of 
coarse cloth and socks and low heels.

Tactility drove us to paper-backs, to the wrap-around space of the small 
car that you put on like your pants, and to skin-diving, small boats, 
water-skiing, and do-it-yourself activities of all kinds.

But TV also means Barbara and Hammond and the triumph of the cartoon.  
For the TV image is of low quality visually and high on tactility or what 
the psychologists call "closure".  And this is where 8mm comes in.  Among 
its assets the 8mm image has more in common with the TV image than does 
16mm or 35mm.  And this is also true of the compact, portable box viewer, 
which is in immediately prospect for 8mm.

Let me mention with regard to the care and feeding of media, a strange 
experience I had recently.  A group of us was watching a series of 
colored slides, for which there was a synchronized tape- recording.  
Afterwards several people asked if they could borrow the film.  Sound 
does strange things, and at present there is still no sound for the TV 
image.  We have made do with the old radio sound track which is a hot 
medium, quite unsuited and visual image will prove immense in the matter 
of nourishing innovation and media development.

Let me finally point out that the externalization of our sense faculties, 
in our media new and old, serves to create new natural resources, new 
staples, and vast new wealth.  It is in no figurative sense that we can 
regard film or radio or press as new resources, as much as oil or timber 
or cotton.  And so it will be with 8mm.  For any new means of making our 
world and ourselves present to all of us acts as a huge enrichment of the 
general diet of experience.  For it is also a new translation of previous 
experience into a new mode or language which releases a variety of new 
qualities and perception in experience.

Now that our technology permits us to extend all of our senses on a 
global scale we have no choice but to assume a new attitude of 
responsibility and understanding of the manner of powers which we have 
released.  The fall-out from new media could easily be more devastating 
to our human equilibrium than nuclear fall-out.  Educationally we stand 
on the threshold of an age which will be the first to understand the 
effect of the media diet, both on men and also on media, new and old.  
Education may become civil defense against media fall-out.
(Conference on 8mm Sound Film and Education,Dinner speech, Teacher's 
College, Nov 8,1961
Columbia University)