Visual thinking
The secret is to avoid eye contact
Marshall McLuhan (1964, age 52). Isn’t it obvious?
“The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.”
Me (August, 2010, age 58). Really?
What did McLuhan mean by this? Read Douglas Coupland’s recent biography of McLuhan and you will find this quotation separated from its context and put up as meaning that a man’s name has a subliminal effect. If your last name is Rich, for example, people won’t think you’re poor. A somewhat kooky idea that McLuhan adopted in his analysis of the difficulties of Richard Nixon. (See this blog – The Power of Names – in which I must admit I did not see this distinction as clearly as I do now.)
Take a look at what McLuhan is actually trying to say with this line in Understanding Media (p. 49). He starts with the observation that “in a highly visual and highly literate culture” – read Canada, Britain or America – most people can’t quite catch the name of a person they’re being introduced to for the first time. Why? Because McLuhan says you’re so caught up in looking at the person that you don’t hear the name. It’s as if the sound is blocked out or dimmed. To get the name you then ask “How do you spell your name?” (How much more visual can you get?) This wouldn’t happen, he says, in a highly auditory ear culture. In such a culture – to reach the quotation at last – “the sound of a man’s name … is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.”
If you lived in an ear culture rather than an eye culture, McLuhan says, you’d hear the name. But we don’t do we? Even today after half a century of television and now the internet we still seem to be a highly visual culture. We still have trouble hearing names for the first time. What do we do to help people hear names at large business meetings and social events? We ask them to wear name tags. (How much more visual can you get?)
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964, pp. 49.
What would Marshall say? (continued)
Me (August, 2010, age 58). McLuhan in conversation (continued)
Yesterday we left Marshall in conversation with journalist Herb Caen at a topless restaurant in San Francisco in August 1965. Readers will recall that McLuhan had called attention to the visual bias of Caen’s language. Let’s take one more look – sorry, I apologize for my visual orientation – at that exchange. Here, to refresh your memory is their conversation from yesterday:
[Caen] Being President of the Leg Men of America, I never felt a primal urge to lunch among the topless ladies, but in such distinguished company who could resist? ‘Strip steak sandwich,’ I said to waitress Marilyn, who was wearing blue sequin pasties and not much else. As she walked away, I commented ‘A good-looking girl.
[McLuhan] Interesting choice of words. Good-LOOKING girl. The remark of a man who is visually oriented, not tactually. And I further noticed that you could not bring yourself to look at her breasts as she took your order. You examined her only after she walked away – another example of the visual: the further she walked away, the more attractive she became.
Question: What do you think Caen said next:
(a) “If you say so Marshall.”
(b) “Fascinating, I never noticed – look I’ve done it again – my visual orientation.”
(c) “What?”
(d) “Actually, I’m rather inhibited.”
Marshall McLuhan (August 1965, age 54) The answer is …
Of course (d) – which, if memory serves me, I followed up with:
Another interesting word. Inhibited is the opposite of exhibited, and what is exhibited causes you to be inhibited.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Herb Caen, “Rainy Day Session,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 12, 1965, p. 25.
What would Marshall say?
Me (August, 2010, age 58). McLuhan in conversation.
Forty-five years ago, in August 1965, McLuhan was in San Francisco to take part in the Marshall McLuhan Festival organized by the PR team of Howard Gossage and Gerald Feigen, who had organized the event to build McLuhan as a public figure. One day they took McLuhan for lunch at a topless restaurant along with journalists Tom Wolfe and Herb Caen. In the article Caen wrote about the outing he reports this exchange between himself and McLuhan:
Being President of the Leg Men of America, I never felt a primal urge to lunch among the topless ladies, but in such distinguished company who could resist? ‘Strip steak sandwich,’ I said to waitress Marilyn, who was wearing blue sequin pasties and not much else. As she walked away, I commented ‘A good-looking girl.’
Question: What do you think McLuhan said next?
(a) “She certainly is.”
(b) “I hear you Herb.”
(c) “Excuse me, Marilyn, I’ll have the strip steak too.”
(d) “Interesting choice of words. Good-LOOKING girl. The remark of a man who is visually oriented, not tactually.”
Marshall McLuhan (August 1965, age 54). The answer is …
Of course (d) – I have little in the way of small talk. And, if memory serves me, after I said that I said this:
And I further noticed that you could not bring yourself to look at her breasts as she took your order. You examined her only after she walked away – another example of the visual: the further she walked away, the more attractive she became.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Herb Caen, “Rainy Day Session,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 12, 1965, p. 25.
Marshall McLuhan: Filmmaker.
Marshall McLuhan (1970, age 68/69). Let’s make a movie!
I have just spent a very productive day with Jane Jacobs. We have written a script for a movie, “A Burning Would.” (You will of course recognize the reference to Finnegans Wake, “A burning would has come to dance inane.”) If all works out this film will either be the final word on the nature of film or stop the Spadina Expressway dead in its tracks.
Me (June 2010, age 57) Lessons?
Jane Jacobs describes the chaotic and exhilarating day she spent with McLuhan writing a film script in Who was Marshall McLuhan. The word “script” is an exaggeration. Here’s how the day went: he persuaded her to give it a try, they talked about ideas, McLuhan’s secretary, Margaret Stewart took notes, and typed them up, and McLuhan made arrangements to meet with the filmmaker David Mackay to discuss the “script.” Jacobs describes the resulting “script” as “garbled and unreadable” but also as “dazzling sparks and fragments.”
Remarkably the film (12 minutes long) was made [and even more remarkably doesn’t seem to be posted on YouTube]. Jacobs says that the film was “good” but “the final product bore no relationship at all to our original script.”
Perhaps, the major lessons to be learned from this film are:
Don’t be afraid to try new things (neither Jacobs nor McLuhan had ever tried to write a script before.)
Get yourself good partners.
Don’t be afraid to fail.
What new things are you doing?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Who Was Marshall McLuhan. Edited by Barrington Nevitt with Maurice McLuhan, 1995, pp. 101-102.
For other inspiration see Julien Smith’s In over your head.
And thanks to Michael Edmunds for this interview of McLuhan on his plans for filmmaking originally published in Take One in the 1970s – Marshall McLuhan makes a movie.
Douglas Coupland’s Marshall McLuhan [cont’d]
Marshall McLuhan (March 20, age 98). I failed!
Corinne went out shopping – heaven’s not what I thought it was going to be – which gave me the opportunity to take that test in Douglas Coupland’s book about me. For the record my score was 21, which is a delightful result, particularly because it is divisible by three.
Me (March 2010, age 57). So did I!
As I promised to do yesterday, I took the test, too. My score was 19, which, sadly, is not divisible by three, but is a prime!
The test as Coupland explains in Marshall McLuhan was devised by psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues at Cambridge. It is called the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, or AQ, and is ‘a measure of the extent of autistic traits in adults.’ According to Coupland ‘in the first major trial using the test, the average score of the control group was 16.4. Eighty percent of those diagnosed with autism or a related disorder scored 32 or higher.’
Coupland suggests that to understand Marshall McLuhan it is helpful to view him as autistic. What does that mean? It does not mean, as Coupland says, that McLuhan couldn’t function in the world. He clearly did and so do many people who are autistic. It means in living his life he displayed particular traits. According to the test, someone with autism is more likely to prefer to do things on their own, do things the same way over and over again, and when imagining something, find it hard to create a picture in their mind. People without autism are just the opposite. Moreover the autistic tend to notice small sounds when others do not, are fascinated by numbers, and don’t particularly enjoy reading fiction.
But looking through this list I find it hard to see Marshall McLuhan as ‘autistic’. For example: He was fascinated by some kinds of numbers (numbers divisible by three – he was superstitious) but not all numbers (he thought of himself as a word man not a number man); and reading fiction was both his passion and his profession as a teacher of English literature at the University of Toronto. Admittedly, however, he did love his routines and often claimed to dislike change of any kind. The question is does the profile of someone with autism give us a quick and dirty way to profile Marshall McLuhan? Douglas Coupland says it does. I say no. I never met Marshall McLuhan. My understanding of him is based on my reading (including 4 biographies, his letters and books, and papers held at the National archives) and interviews with some people who knew him (including Professor Abraham Rotstein – who was part of McLuhan’s discussion group on media and technology at Toronto in the 1960s -and Dr. Michael Easterbrook – who is the son of McLuhan’s closest and oldest friend – Tom Easterbrook.
To profile Marshall McLuhan as ‘autistic’ makes for good tabloid reading. McLuhan did have some of the characteristics of autism. His hearing – like Coupland’s, apparently – was preternaturally acute. But many of the traits of autism seem to me to be wrong or smudgy ways to understand him. For example, the autistic, it is said, are often the last to understand the point of a joke. Marshall McLuhan was an irrepressible punning wise guy.
At bottom, my view is that to profile him as autistic is wrong on two levels. First, and most basically, it is wrong because the traits of autism mislead as much as they help in understanding McLuhan. And second, more fundamentally, it is wrong because it suggests, falsely, that McLuhan can be understood in one simple step. The messy reality of McLuhan is that he was an eccentrically unique complex individual who can and cannot be understood simply. A man of extraordinary gifts – creative genius, a photographic memory, the ability to make profound associations between people and events that at first sight would seem to be unrelated – he was a brilliant and unstoppable talker and a horrendous listener, oblivious social niceties and the needs of others. To label him as ‘autistic’ is not to know him better but to know him less.
Did you pass the test?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan, 2009
Everything can be checked out
Marshall McLuhan (July 3, 1964, age 52). My statements are not opinions.
People seem to believe that I make things up out of thin air. It simply isn’t true. Everything that I say can be checked out, and if it doesn’t check out – à la Popper – it can be chucked out. If I was simply expressing a personal opinion I wouldn’t bother to say it.
Me (February 2010, age 57). Can we check this out?
Here is one of the statements of Marshall McLuhan: since the advent of TV Americans have become less visual.
(The visual he said perceive the world as “uniform, continuous, and connected” – like a page of printed text. To be visual is to view the world from a distance – to be uninvolved, objective, and rational. To view the world less visually is to perceive it more acoustically – acoustic space is “fluctuating, discontinuous, and disconnected” – the world viewed up close – intimately, emotionally and tactically. The less visual are less objective, less rational. They are involved.)
A case can certainly be made that this is true. Compare “The Dick Cavett Show” to “Oprah”, the “The Twilight Zone” to “Numbers” or “Perry Mason” to “Boston Legal.” America today has a more tactile less visual feel. Granted, it’s not a scientific test, but in a rough and ready way it does provide support for Marshall McLuhan’s statement.
Are we all becoming more or less visual? Is each generation less visual than its predecessor? If so, what difference does it make?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p.304
We are not visual creatures any more
Marshall McLuhan (May 1964, age 52). North Americans are biased.
It is odd that North Americans will accept no other way of perceiving the world apart from the visual. The Brits have never gone this far, nor the French. To North Americans there is only one way for rational people to understand the world: in visual space. Visual space is continuous, uniform, and connected. That is the bias the North American brings to his understanding. Here only seeing is believing. There is no other way.
Me (February 2010, age 57). Today feeling is believing.
If Marshall McLuhan was right about the power of new electric media North Americans – especially those who are the second, third and fourth generations of TV kids – are no longer visually biased. The new bias is that of acoustic space, which is discontinuous, non-uniform, and disconnected.
Today seeing is no longer believing – feeling is believing. The good life is tactile: It’s “cool” “sweet” or “juicy.”
How many of the trends and assumptions of the world today fit with this new bias? Shortening attention spans, illiteracy and innumeracy, the failing of teachers rather than students, relative truth, the importance placed on intuition and feelings, emotional intelligence, grade inflation, political correctness?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p.300
Be careful how you mark-up your books
Marshall McLuhan (November 19, 1952, age 41). Writing in books
I have more fun writing in books than I do writing books. The End of the Gutenberg Era book is taking longer than I thought. Not surprising, as Corinne tells me I seem to be reading all literature for it. Here’s how I attack a book. First I dip into it and grab the big message then I go back and talk with the writer, that is I write to him in the margins. Take this new book that just came out, by William H. Whyte, Jr., and the editors of Fortune magazine, Is Anybody listening? Here’s the heart: PR types at G.M., G.E. and I.B.M. are spending a fortune selling capitalism and democracy to the world. And Whyte delivers the shocking news that despite the all expenses paid field trips to New York, London, Paris, and L.A. nobody’s listening!
Here’s one of the conversations I had with Whyte in the margins of his book. “Of course they aren’t. Nobody expects people are going to read advertizing copy before they actually buy it. You should talk with David Ogilvie he’ll give you the low down. It’s a well understood fact on Madison Avenue that people only read ad copy after they buy the product.” That’s what Corinne did when I went out and bought her that new vacuum cleaner she’s been asking for. Spent a whole lunch hour pouring over the glossy pamphlets provided by the good folks at Hoover. And that’s why Canadian teenagers don’t like Canadian history; they haven’t bought the product yet.
Me (November 2009, age 57). The problem with highlighting
Marshall McLuhan wrote in his books. If you go to the national archives you can see his writing in his copies of Saussure, Joyce, and the rest. I do much the same myself with McLuhan’s books. Except that I often write orders to myself. Things like “compare this 1952 outline for The End of the Gutenberg Era to the final table of contents of 1962 The Gutenberg Galaxy.” Or “See Postman.”
There are different ways of marking in books. Many students I see studying at McGill and Concordia University seem to prefer highlighting. That is you work your way through a photocopied article or textbook assiduously highlighting in pink, yellow, or blue everything you think is worth keeping and ignoring the rest. This approach is a method of summarization. In the olden days, before highlighters, students would underline using coloured pencils or ball point pens to obtain a similar result. The idea being, I think, that the highlighted or underlined material was what you should pay attention to when you re-read the article or text when it was time to study for your final exams.
The problem is highlighting or underlining does not make you the equal of the article or text, it makes you subservient to it. May be that’s what you need to do to get an undergraduate degree at university; talking, conversing, writing in the margins is what you need to do to be the equal or the better of the writers of the books you read.
Do you write in your books? Do you underline? Do you highlight? Do use post it notes? Is it possible to read an electronic book or an article or book on your computer’s screen with understanding if you cannot mark it or make notes on it in some way?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
William H. Whyte, Jr. Is Anybody Listening? New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952.
Logic: The magic number 2
Marshall McLuhan (May 1959, age 47). Producers are becoming consumers
What an inauspicious day, Friday the thirteenth. Thank God my flight was yesterday. I flew in from Winnipeg where I spoke to the Winnipeg Ad and Sales Club. I led off with one of my favourite anecdotes, “Whenever I fly, I always carry a powerful bomb with me. This absolutely insures my safety, the probability of there being two such bombs on the plane being infinitesimally low.” They also liked my Newfie joke: “What’s written on the bottom of a Newfie beer bottle? Open other end.” Liked is a strong word, let’s say they were appreciative.
The ad men did a double take when I told them in the electric age, which is the age in which we live, things are moving so fast producers are becoming consumers. It’s a complex phenomenon, but basically a simple idea. Things are changing so fast producers have figured out ways to speed up, to go faster than the wave, and one way to do that is to understand consumers so well that you know them better than they do themselves. And when you do that you can anticipate their wants. That’s why the Russians launched Sputnik and why Prime Minister Diefenbaker is making a serious error in canceling the Avro Arrow. The biggest investment business is making today is in research and development. They do this not to create a lot of new machines, products, services but to speed up to stay ahead of all the change that’s built in to the system.
Michael Hinton (2009, age 57). The rule of 2
If Marshall McLuhan believed in the magical power of 3, he also believed in the logical power of the number 2. Pairs of concepts, the end points of a single dimension, opposites, either ors, this and that’s run through his work. Hot and cool, high definition and low definition, figure and ground, right brain and left brain, cliché and archetype, medium and message, visual and acoustic, eye and ear. So that even in his doctoral dissertation which he described as a history of the Trivium, the 3 disciplines of grammar rhetoric and logic which dominated schooling in the middle ages, for analytical purposes he reduced to a battle between 2 forces over time, the grammarians and the rhetoricians.
Twos are powerful precisely because they exclude grey middle possibilities. They force you to make clear distinctions, to make decisions, to avoid weaseling and waffling. All media he taught are hot or cool, not hot, warm, or cool. This bias for black or white bothered his quibble-prone academic readers, even those who viewed his work positively. For example, in his review of The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media in the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, Kenneth Boulding argues that to McLuhan the key dimension on which hot and cool media differed was “involvement.” But surely he argued other dimensions mattered too – such as “demandingness or effort,” “range in time and space,’ and,” “density or capacity.” These quibbles it’s worth noting all implicitly reject McLuhan’s starting point that what matters is the medium not it’s content.
For McLuhan, however, the power of a single dimension with 2 possibilities only was greater than the power of safer equivocating and qualifying multidimensional thinking. He believed in absolutes. Qualifications were for the intellectually weak of heart.
What other examples of 2s in McLuhan’s work are there? Which is the one you have found most stimulating?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p. 252-255.
Boulding, Kenneth E. “The Medium and the Message,” reprinted in McLuhan: Hot and Cool. Edited by Gerald Emanuel Stearn. New York: New American Library, 1967, pp. 68-75.