Eric:
(Side: Why am I the only person in the mountains with a mic? Normal people
have cameras.)
It's great that you're looking into McLuhan, there's a lot to ponder there!
He treats questions like yours in terms of technology "biases" (in sensory
terms), the differences between what the Gestaltists call "figure" and
"ground" and was also very interested in studying sensory multi-modality.
His career (as something other than an English professor) was started in
1953, when the Ford Foundation granted him (and four others) $43,500 (about
10x that in today's dollars) to run a 2-year interdisciplinary graduate
seminar in "Changing Patterns of Language and Behavior and the New Media of
Communication" -- out of which came the important (but little read, since it
hasn't yet been released in digital format) journal "Explorations."
He tried to get Ford to fund an ongoing effort but the Foundation shut down
its "behavioral science" division in 1957. After being offered the job to
head the Annenberg Center at UPenn, in 1963 the University of Toronto
(where he had been since 1946), made him the offer to run the "Center for
Culture and Communications" (aka Coach House), which ran until his death in
1980.
His greatest problem, in terms of getting others to work on his ideas,
were the psychologists at UofT. The fellow involved in the seminar only
wanted to deal with "statistics," which didn't fit at all with what was being
discussed by the others, and the guy who initially agree to work with him on
"sensory balance" then decided that he wanted to turn it into a company and
claimed "proprietary" rights to the experimental techniques. Yes, IBM was
an early funding source for these -- ultimately aborted -- efforts.
I wonder if anyone ever took them up? I suspect that the military funding
for virtual reality simulators is as close as that has come but probably
not with anything like his insights.
In McLuhan's use of Gestalt psychology, the posited the notion that
"dominant" technologies impose a "sensory bias" on cultures which are generally
not recognized, since, in Gestalt terms, they were the "ground" which we tend
to ignore in favor of the "figures" that endlessly distract us.
His 1962 "Gutenberg Galaxy" is an exposition of what happens when vision is
that experiential ground -- driven by the "linearity" of printing
technology. His 1964 "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man" was a
discussion of what happened when printing was replaced by "electric media,"
starting
with telegraph in the mid-18th century.
In his terms, we shifted from a world where the "eye" was psychologically
dominant to one in which the "ear" became our "ground" (but not recognized
as such) -- producing an experience that was akin to (but not the same as)
an earlier sort of culture that relied completely on "oral" communications.
Some called this "secondary orality" and examined the cultural shifts
that accompanied the move from an oral to a written culture (circa 500 BC) --
particularly McLuhan's student Walter Ong in his "Orality and Literacy."
Obviously, the "aural" has many qualities that differ from the "visual."
To start with we have no "earlids" (so we are always "listening") and sound
forms a "surround" bubble coming at us from all directions and forcing us
to be "involved." This is where the phrase "global village" came from
(although, like many other such phrases, it was *not* the one preferred by
McLuhan and was borrowed from someone else).
Using this approach -- which to be sure was not of much interest to those
who preferred to think in terms of "information theory" and
"sender-channel-receiver" models, including many scientists on this list --
the "visual"
became a psychological "figure" in the 20th century (i.e. was no longer the
"ground"), so that it could then be explicitly "played with," resulting in
"modern art."
Picasso et all, if you will, was a "result" of telegraph/radio as these
artists played with sight in a world that was now structured around sound.
For McLuhan, the most obvious example of all this was James Joyce -- who
completely "destroyed" the earlier linearity (i.e. "visual bias") of
literature.
Correspondingly, the opportunity to "play with" sound would require that
our "hidden" bias towards the "acoustic" also transition from
ground-to-figure, which could only happen when something "new" became the
*unrecognized*
basis of experience, displacing the "electric media" of television with its
"acoustic space."
I have argued on this list that indeed this has happened (i.e. the
Internet) and that the existence of a mailing list devoted to doing just that
--
specifically the "surround" quality of sound technologies -- shows that the
"aural" is now a *figure* that we can play with. The result is you (and
others on this list) walking around in "nature" with a microphone.
In McLuhan's terms, the NEW sensory bias is "tactility" -- which is, if you
will, a full-body experience, but certainly one that means using our
HANDS, just as I am in typing this to you!
Mark Stahlman
Brooklyn NY
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