C.P. Snow, reviewing a book of A.L. Rowse (The New York Times Book Review, December 24, 1961) on Appeasement and the road to Munich, describes the top level of British Brains and the experience in the 1930s. “Their I.Q.’s were much higher than usual among political bosses. Why were they such a disaster?” The view of Rowse, Snow approves: “They would not listen to warnings because they did not wish to hear.” Being anti-Red made it impossible to read the message of Hitler. But their failure was nothing compared to our present one. The American stake at literacy as a technology or uniformity applied to every level of education, government, industry, and social life is totally threatened by electric technology. The threat of Stalin or Hitler was external. The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind, and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology, on and through which the American way of life is formed. It is, however, no time to suggest strategies when the threat has not been acknowledged to exist. I am in the position of Louis Pasteur telling doctors that their greatest enemy was quite invisible, and quite unrecognized by them. Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the “content” of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as “content”. The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera. The effect of the movie form is not related to its program content. The “content” of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech.[1]
Marshall
McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)
[1] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Critical Edition, ed. W. Terence Gordon (Berkeley: Ginko Press, 2015), pp. 30,31.
