Understanding Media

Part I

Introduction

During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extension of man - the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our sense and our nerves by the various media.
We actually live mythically and integrally, as it were, but we continue to think in the old, fragmented space and time patterns of the pre-electric age.
Western man acquired from the technology of literacy the power to act without reacting. The advantages of fragmenting himself in this way are seen in the case of the surgeon who would be quite helpless if he were to become humanly involved in his operation. We acquired the art of carrying out the most dangerous social operations with complete detachment. But our detachment was a posture of noninvolvement.
In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the alood and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.

1. Medium is the Message

The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell our some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the content of any medium is always another medium.
Rational, of course, has for the West long meant "uniform and continuous and sequential." In other words, we have confused reason with literacy, and rationalism with a single technology.
It is in our IA testing that we have produced the greatest flood of misbegotten standards. Unaware of our typographic cultural bias, our testers assume that uniform and continuous habits are a sign of intelligence, thus eliminating the ear man and the tactile man.
The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense rations, or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.

2. Media Hot and Cold

A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in "high definition". High definition is the state of being well filled with data
A photograph is, visually, high def. A cartoon is low def simply because very little visual information is provided.
Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience.
Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio, has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone.
Specialist technologies detribalize. The nonspecialist electric technology retribalizes.
Myth is the instant vision of a complex process that ordinarily extends over a long period. Myth is contraction or implosion of any process, and the instant speed of electricity confers the mythic dimension on ordinary industrial and social action today. We live mythically but continue to think fragmentarily and on single planes.
Concern with effect rather than meaning is a basic change of our electric time, for effect involves the total situation, and not a single level of information movement.
The hotting-up of one sense tends to effect hypnosis, and the cooling of all senses tends to result in hallucination.

3. Reversal of the Overheated Medium

WB Yeats: "The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world is no longer a dream."

4. The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis

All extensions of ourselves, in sickness or in health, are attempts to maintain equilibrium. Any extension of ourselves they regard as "autoamputation" and they find that the autoamputative power or strategy is resorted to by the body when the perceptual power cannot locate or avoid the cause of irritation."
In the physical stress of superstimulation of various kinds, the central nervous system acts to protect itself by a strategy of amputation or isolation of the offending organ, sense, or function. Thus the stimulus to new invention is the stress of acceleration of pace and increase of load.
Whatever threatens the function of the central nervous system must be contained, localized, or cut off, even to the total removal of the offending organ. The function of the body, as a group of sustaining and protective organs for the CNS, is to act as buffers against sudden variations of stimulus in the physical and social environment.
Therapy, whether physical or social, is a counter-irritant that aids in that equilibrium of the physical organs which protect the CNS. Whereas pleasure is a counter-irritant, comfort is the removal of irritants. Both pleasure and comfort are strategies of equilibrium for the CNS.
The development of writing and the visual organization of life made possible the discovery of individualism, introspection and so on.
Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms.
We have to numb our CNS when it is extended and exposed, or we will die. Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy. But it is strikingly the age of consciousness of the unconscious, in addition.
In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin.

5. Hybrid Energy: Les Liaisons Dangereuses

Fragmented, literate, and visual individualism is not possible in an electrically patterned and imploded society.
The hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born. For the parallel between two media holds us on the frontiers between forms that snap us out of the Narcissus-narcosis. The moment of the meeting of media is a moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them on our senses.

6. Media as Translators

Robert Browning: "A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor."
All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms.
The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way. Words are a kind of information retrieval that can range over the total environment and experience at high speed. Words are complex systems of metaphors and symbols that translate experience into our uttered or outered senses. They are a technology of explicitness. by means of translation of immediate sense experience into vocal symbols the entire world can be evoked and retrieved at any instant.
In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness. That is what is meant when we say that we daily know more and more about man. We mean that we can translate more and more of ourselves into other forms of expression that exceed ourselves. Man is a form of expression who is traditionally expected to repeat himself and to echo the prais of his Creator.
...an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide.
...previous technologies were partial and fragmentary, and the electric is total and inclusive. An external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private consciousness. We the new media, however, it is also possible to store and to translate everything; and, as for speed, that is no problem. No further acceleration is possible this side of the light barrier.
Under electric technology the entire business of man becomes learning and knowing... all forms of wealth result from the movement of information.
Stephane Mallarmé; "the world exists to end in a book".
...the Freudian idea that when we fail to translate some natural event or experience into conscious art we "repress" it.
It is in this way that by seeing one set of relations through another set that we store and amplify experience in such forms as money. For money is also a metaphor. And all media as extensions of ourselves serve to provide new transforming vision and awareness.

7. Challenge and Collapse: The Nemesis of Creativity

The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.
Wyndham Lewis: "The artist is always engage in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present."
To reward and to make celebrities of artists can, also, be a way of ignoring their prophetic work, and preventing its timely use for survival. The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in hiw own time. He is the man of integral awareness.
What would happen if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties. Would we, then, cease to look at works of art as an explorer might regard the gold and gems used as the ornaments of simple nonliterates?
Once we have surrendered our sense and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left.

Part II

=== 8. The Spoken Word: Flower of Evil

=== 9. The Written Word: An Eye for an Ear

=== 10. Roads and Paper Routes

=== 11. Number: Profile of the Crowd

=== 12. Clothing: Our Extended Skin

=== 13. Housing: New Look and New Outlook

=== 14. Money: The Poor Man's Credit Card

=== 15. Clocks: The Scent of Time

=== 16. The Print: How to Dig It

=== 17. Comics: Made Vestibule to TV

=== 18. The Printed Word: Architect of Nationalism

=== 19. Wheel, Bicycle, and Airplane

=== 20. The Photograph: The Brothel-without-Walls

=== 21. Press: Government by News Leak

=== 22. Motorcar: The Mechanical Bride

=== 23. Ads: Keeping Upset with the Joneses

=== 24. Games: The Extensions of Man

=== 25. Telegraph: The Social Hormone

=== 26. The Typewriter: Into the Age of the Iron Whim

=== 27. The Telephone: Sounding Brass or Tinking Symbol

=== 28. The Phonograph: The Toy That Shrank the National Chest

=== 29. Movies: The Reel World

=== 30. Radio: The Tribal Drum

=== 31. Television: The Timid Giant

=== 32. Weapons: War of the Icons

=== 33. Automation: Learning a Living