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On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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12. Marshall McLuhan

Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born in Edmonton, in the province of Alberta, Canada, in 1911. He studied at the University of Manitoba and obtained his Ph.D. at Cambridge, England, in 1942. After teaching at the University of Wisconsin, the University of St. Louis, and Assumption University, he came in 1946 to St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto, Canada, where he is director of the Center of Culture and Technology.
Some of his best-known books are The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), Understanding Media (1964), The Medium Is the Message (1967), War and Peace in the Global Village (1968), Culture Is Our Business (1970), and published recently with Barrington Nevitt, Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (1972).

Professor McLuhan, what do you call ‘ground’?

 

It is a term from Gestalt psychology.1 Look at the ground ‘around’ the figure of the automobile, or the ground ‘around’ any technology. Each kind of technique, or technology, necessarily has a large ground of services and disservices associated with it. Now, the ordinary attention is fixed on the figure rather than the ground, on the wheel rather than the huge system of road services necessary to maintain the existence of a wheel or wheeled vehicles. With a motorcar, most people are interested in changing designs or patterns of the car. They pay only incidental attention to the huge service environment of roads, oil companies, filling stations, and other allied services of manufacturing that are the ground of the car.

The motorcar, when it was first introduced in the early part of the century, was thought to be a sure way of getting rid of cities, by taking us back to the country. Watching the figure of the car, they saw the immediate possibility of simply transporting city dwellers back into the country where they came from. An early phrase about the motorcar was: ‘Let's take a spin in the country.’ It never occurred to them that this figure of the car might generate a huge ground of new services far bigger than the figure ever was thought to be. In other words, the car created a totally new environment or ground of services and disservices which we have come to associate with the American way of life.

There is another weird feature of the car which is completely unnoticed. The car is the ultimate form of privacy in America. In Europe, the motorcar is a toy, a fun thing. In America, it is the ultimate den or boudoir, the main form of privacy; and therefore every American has to have a big car. He is not going to use public transit because that means going out to be with people. In North America there is a universal and hidden assumption that we go outside to be alone. That's why we do not have cafés or pubs or public entertainment, except for our

‘dates.’ When we go out with our dates, we do not go out to socialize. On the other hand, when we go home, we do not go home to be alone, we go home to be with people. There is little or no privacy in the American home. But this total situation is a hidden ground around another figure, the figure of the pioneer determined to conquer nature, as a commando or as a team.

By not looking at the ground around the automobile, you miss the message of the car. For it is the ground of any technology that is the medium that changes everybody, and it is the medium that is the message of the technology, not the figure.

 

You mentioned ancient Rome apropos figure and ground interplay.

 

The huge service surround necessary to maintain even the roads of Rome suddenly collapsed because they had become too expensive and required too much skilled labor. Roman roads were marble-surfaced for speed and smoothness. The courier system, sustained by the roads, was, in turn, a ground created by papyrus, which was a figure with its own ground of services, which included a further environment of a military kind. The whole Roman military system depended upon papyrus and written documents that could be moved very quickly across large territories. This kind of communication, in turn, fostered the wheel and the wheeled vehicle. But there is very little study of what sort of roads they had. It has mainly been noticed where they were. But the Roman road as figure involved a huge ground of services, deriving ultimately, perhaps, from papyrus.

Papyrus supplies ended when the Nile got polluted. It does not grow even today, except in the upper Nile which is relatively free of pollution. But when the papyrus plant could no longer grow in the Nile, the Romans switched to parchment, which remained the medieval form of paper. It was too scarce for the old papyrus uses, however. But the paper system necessary to maintain the huge military bureaucracy depended on a diversified but hidden ground, or environment.

The figure of paper is really the key to the ground; but the ground is not chosen for study, even though it is the ground that creates the changes in people. The figure is not the medium and it is not the cause of change. However, it is the figure that creates the ground that is the means of changing people using any technology. Yet the figure merely sits upon the ground itself, while it is the services engendered by such a technology that alter the lives of people.

In the movie industry, for example, the huge Hollywood surround of services dried up very quickly when the figures of jet and TV appeared. It was the new figures that eroded the whole ground for the film industry. Film-making for home television, rather than for movie theaters, completely decentralized services. Hollywood, but not the cinema, was finished overnight. Now that's how quickly a new figure can disperse or dissolve an old ground. It is the old ground that provided, and indeed, was the movie way of life. Hollywood itself was a new way of life which is now gone.

 

It is sometimes said that the motorcar is ‘obsolete.’

 

This term has many meanings, and I once spent months studying ‘obsolescence as the matrix of innovation.’ Perhaps the simplest way to get at the changing role of the car is to point to the fact that the jet plane has put an entire new environment around, not just the figure of the car, but the ground of the car. The jet goes around the entire highway system, even as the highways had earlier gone around the railway system. By offering a totally new kind of transportation services, the jet threatens the highway as much as the highway threatened the railway. The jet offers a completely new time scale to travelers, creating a ground of services that is worldwide and on a twenty-four-hour pattern, giving access to every part of the globe. The jet has not only revolutionized the planning and conduct of all commercial activity, but of all politics and all news coverage as well. Tapes and films are flown from all parts of the world on a twenty-four-hour basis. Students, for example, can now plan their studies in completely new ways, since it is as cheap and as quick to go to distant countries to study language or archaeology as it is to take a course in the local university. Meantime, the local university has obtained grants to send its staff to all parts of the world to pursue projects of the utmost diversity. In contrast, the motorcar and its service environment takes up new functions both of utility and recreation, which are, to a considerable degree, dictated by the new time scales of jet travel.

Thus, it is not so much the car as a figure, as the ground of the car that is transformed by the new service environment of the jet. This same new service environment of the jet profoundly alters people's image of themselves and of one another, as witness the hijackers for whom the jet offers the immediate prospect of world news coverage. There is a sense in which the hijackers are the real jet set who have, as it were,

intuitively grasped the meaning of this new medium as a thing that has bypassed the establishment and outmoded our legal system. Perhaps, then, it is possible to approach ‘obsolescence’ in this way, and see it as a phasing out of some service by a new service, by the encompassing of the old ground by a new ground. This does not, however, mean extinction of the previous service, since in many cases the older service can go along side by side with the new service, as in the case of the motor car and the jet, or of handwriting and the printed word. Even the typewriter did not extinguish handwriting. There may well be more handwriting in the world today than there was before printing. But quantity is no clue to function or use.

In terms of obsolescence the printed book has been bypassed several times by new services, such as photography and film and Xerox. Whereas Gutenberg2 made everybody a reader, Xerox makes everybody a publisher, bringing the Gutenberg technology full cycle, as it were. Yet the old uses of the printed book remain side by side with many of the new features of photo and film and Xerox. If one looks deeper, however, it is evident that when one service is enveloped by a new service, those who employ the old service are deeply affected by it. Writing for the press in the age of the print and the photo was considerably altered by these intensely realistic developments. Cinema used the book for scripting, but cinematic techniques, in turn, radically altered modes both of perception and composition.

 

Do the MIT global studies of man and his situation cover the ground?

 

It might be well to point out that these studies are carried out on ‘systems development’ patterns which tend to concentrate on the figure and ignore the ground, or the surround, of services and disservices. Similarly, the Milton Eisenhower3 report on violence is mainly concerned with the images of violence as they are presented in various programs in various media. Violence is accepted as a figure of program input, and these studies try to discover a matching ground, or cause, to explain this figure. In practice, however, the figure of violence has its meaning only against an altogether different ground, namely, the extreme mobility of contemporary human environments. Mobility, as such, erodes human identity, and the threat to identity is the proximate cause of ‘violence.’ In all cases, violence is a response to threatened identity images; and since many kinds of change can threaten identity, there are a great many kinds of violence or response to these threats. For example, the use of

the car or plane, insofar as it exceeds all private or individual human power, represents an aggressive manifestation of the human ego which, on the one hand, asserts the identity of the driver or user and, on the other hand, threatens the identity or even the very existence of those in the environment of this activity. If only for that reason, speed and power incite all people to use the same means to assert and to protect their own identity. In this situation, the cyclist, for example, is an extremely violent person, asserting his threatened identity by the most extreme measure of resistance.

General systems studies have so far discovered no way of investigating the ground of any figure. For example, to study the nature of radio by establishing the number of listeners, and the kinds of programs, simply ignores the effects of radio, as radio, on the human psyche and nervous system. Radio as ground, as a world surround, transforms the relation of everybody to everybody, regardless of programming. General systems studies, like most media studies, ignore the rub of figure against ground and try to deduce the ground by a simple quantitative study of the figure, which is then relegated to the category of ‘content.’ This approach leads to hopeless confusion, since in every instance, and in the case of every medium whatever, whether of language or clothing or radio or TV, it is the user himself who is the content, and it is the user alone who constitutes the experience of that service. No matter what is on TV, if the user is a Chinese, it is going to be a Chinese program, just as surely as a movie on TV is experienced as a TV show. For the TV medium translates the movie medium into itself, rendering not a movie, but a TV image.

In this respect the systems-development people, whether at MIT or at the Rand Corporation, try to translate all ground into figure in their studies and they classify all effects in terms of ‘inputs.’ Their reason for doing this is related to the fact that all of these investigators are unconsciously alphabetic and literate men who can think of no other strategies of investigation except in terms of quantitative assumptions by means of yes-no or ‘two-bit’ programs.4

The problem of Western literate man, when he confronts an African or Oriental, is his aggressive need to translate the African or Oriental into his alphabetic culture in order to dominate him. There are inherent reasons why phonetically literate man is a one-way character incapable of two-way dialogue with any other kind of culture. These reasons are discussed in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man.5 Phonetically literate man, from the Greeks to the present, has refused to study the effects of anything, since he is totally committed to inputs

and content only. Inputs he considers to be the content, and anything which impedes the movement of these inputs to their target is called ‘noise.’ Today, phonetically literate man is in great trouble because of his inflexibility, and also because he is now merely one figure in a huge acoustic ground of simultaneous electric information.

When the Club of Rome made its study of the limits to growth, it committed the usual Western mistake of studying only hardware and inputs, ignoring the quality of life and the satisfactions and effects of the various ways of life. Phonetically literate man has systematically ignored the effects of phonetic literacy on himself or on others. The Japanese are about to launch a multibillion program to impose Western phonetic literacy on the whole of Japan. This program will scrub off the entire face of Japan, eroding its oral culture and its iconology and ritual. The ripping-off of the entire Japanese identity will release a fantastic flood of violence and a corporate quest for new identity on a competitive scale unimagined in human history. Phonetically literate man, from the Greeks to the present, has been consistently aggressive and at war with his environment. His need to translate his environment into phonetic, literate terms, turns him into a conqueror and a cultural bulldozer, or leveller. Since Sputnik, the sudden awareness of the planet as an art form has compelled men to program all aspects of the old ‘nature.’ When the planet went inside a manmade environment, art superseded nature for good or ill, much as the market had superseded nature in the nineteenth century. The recognition that survival now depends upon an ecological balance of all factors simultaneously, in a deep sense makes Western man ‘obsolete.’ Indeed, his own new electric environment drives him inward, even as the old Western hardware is driving the Orient outward toward nineteenth-century objectives of conquest.


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