00:00:13:10 - 00:00:36:28 Unknown Television is cool and radio is hot. That's the message. And the medium is Marshall McLuhan. Good evening and welcome to Monday Conference, which has often been said to be not so hot. When future historians look back on the 20th century, it's almost certain that one of the statements from this era which they will treasure posterity, is the medium is the message. 00:00:37:06 - 00:00:57:25 Unknown Like most of Marshall McLuhan statements, it's pithy, apparently simple and provocative to the point of being outrageous. Another of his propositions is that some media are cool and some are hot. Marshall McLuhan studies the media as a way of understanding what it is that makes us live in the way we do, as a way of understanding society itself. 00:00:57:27 - 00:01:27:28 Unknown He's concerned with all media, but he's best known for his work on the electronic media, particularly radio and television. He sees them as the extension of our central nervous system, and argues that they're leading to an electrical retrieval of the West. If there is a mr. electric of the 20th century, it's Marshall McLuhan. More formally, he's professor of English in the University of Toronto, Canada, and director of the center for Culture and Technology there. 00:01:28:01 - 00:01:56:27 Unknown Among professor McLuhan's books are The Mechanical Bride, War and Peace in the Global Village, and, of course, Understanding Media The Extensions of Man. Marshall McLuhan has been brought to Australia by the Sydney radio station to SM to address a seminar on the commercial, broadcasting and music industries earlier tonight. Professor McLuhan gave his address, and now he's ready for questions from the audience with us, made up of the participants in the seminar and members of the general public. 00:01:56:28 - 00:02:29:09 Unknown You've said that television promotes illiteracy. I'm wondering whether you think that's a bad thing. Well, I don't think it promotes illiteracy. I think it creates another form of awareness. Literacy had very strange antecedents, very strange effects on people. And we're only beginning to notice what those effects were. Now that it tends to be pushed aside. The literacy as a form of awareness is a highly specialist and objective sort of thing. 00:02:29:10 - 00:02:59:06 Unknown You can stand back and the literate man can stand back objectively and look at the TV. Person has no objectivity at all. But does television say promote illiteracy or doesn't it? It tends to create a totally different kind of awareness, which is rather that of involvement. Literacy is objectively TV is subjective, totally involving. In fact, the people who watch a lot of television or listen to a lot of radio say, do they read more or read less? 00:02:59:06 - 00:03:07:01 Unknown Or do I think radio people are far more literate than TV people? But. 00:03:07:03 - 00:03:12:07 Unknown No. This. 00:03:12:09 - 00:03:39:13 Unknown This is complementarity of the media. But the I don't I personally have avoided making value judgments because I long ago discovered that value judgments are so personal that it confuses people enormously. Yes, but that's that is a kind of value judgment in itself, isn't it? Well, not of a medium, but of people. And people are very diversified. It's long. 00:03:39:14 - 00:04:09:16 Unknown It's been known for a long time that a reader, for example, the word read, to read means to guess, look it up in the big dictionary. The word radon means to guess. And reading is actually an activity of rapid guessing, because any word, any word has so many meanings, including the word reading, many, many meanings, that to select one in a context of other words requires very rapid guessing. 00:04:09:16 - 00:04:31:10 Unknown That's why a good reader tends to be a very quick decision maker and a good reader. A highly littered person tends to be a good executive because he has to make decisions very fast while reading. And so the the very nature of reading calls for quick decisions and guessing and the, the what's what the word means to guess. 00:04:31:13 - 00:04:56:13 Unknown Ray down. One last point for me. You've said that advertising is the folk art of the 20th century. In what sense is an art? I think it is a very great art form. It's not a private art form, its corporate, but it is. The concern of the advertiser is to make an effect. 00:04:56:15 - 00:05:22:28 Unknown The any painter or any any artist, any musician sets out to create an effect. He sets a trap to catch somebody's attention. Any painter, any poet, any musician sets a trap for your attention. That is the nature of art. Do you think there are any masterpieces of advertising or radio or television in the sense that there are. We'll know. 00:05:23:01 - 00:05:49:27 Unknown We'll know better in what, 50 years? What's your guess now? Well, I know that there are. On the other hand, the ones we might select now is the great ads of the year. Would probably not get the same vote 50 years from now. But the now Mr. Shakespeare wrote plays that were considered very vulgar and popular entertainment in his own day, and nobody had any criteria for measuring his greatness at that time. 00:05:50:03 - 00:06:16:03 Unknown He was a popular artist, and TV is a popular folk art and we have no criteria for measuring it. The measurements that we do use are just the results. Bottom line how many sales resulted from this particular ad? But that's box office. Thank you. Now, someone from the audience, please. Yes. 00:06:16:06 - 00:06:55:18 Unknown If if the medium is the message and it doesn't matter what we say on TV. Why are we all here tonight? And why am I asking this question? I didn't I didn't say it didn't matter what you asked on TV. I said that the effect of TV, the message of TV is quite independent of the program. That is, there is a huge technology involved in TV which surrounds you physically, and the effect of that huge service environment on you personally is vast. 00:06:55:24 - 00:07:17:20 Unknown The effect of the program is incidental. Please would you show your undoubted enthusiasm by having your hands up? It really does make it much easier if I can see. I'm sorry. Yes, yes, those of us who are McLuhan students know how clearly you define a problem for us. We also know that very often you point to an answer to. 00:07:17:22 - 00:07:50:20 Unknown Earlier in your talk this evening, you spoke about the search for identity through violence. I think we'd all agree now, if we ever could afford violence, we can. As weaponry becomes more efficient, we can no longer corporately afford violence. So what do you suggest as alternatives that we offer instead of the search for identity through violence dialog, the alternative to violence is dialog, which is a kind of encounter interface with other people and situations. 00:07:50:22 - 00:08:18:00 Unknown But yes, we live in a world in which we have so much power. In the old days, you could fire a pull a trigger on a revolver and hurt people. But today, when you trigger these vast media that we use, you are manipulating entire populations and the kinds of violence that we can now exert collectively are such as to require the situation to cool to write down. 00:08:18:00 - 00:08:55:15 Unknown Cool, cool, cool. And we have, you know, by means of the overkill, we have created a kind of universal peace in the world. The the means of destruction are so vast at our command that we if war becomes unthinkable. So in the same way, people are cooled off by media and by situations which require dialog rather than just self-expression, violence is a kind of self-expression, and so that the quest for identity. 00:08:55:18 - 00:09:27:03 Unknown The person who is struggling to find out who am I by all sorts of maladjustment, all sorts of quarrels, all sorts of encounters. Such a person is a social nuisance, of course, but quest, the quest for identity, goes along with this, bumping into other people in order to get to find out who am I? How much power can I exert? 00:09:27:06 - 00:09:53:14 Unknown How much identity do can I discover that I possess by simply banging into other people? And so that's what I had in mind when I said that the quest for identity is always a violent quest. It's a series of adventures and encounters that create all sorts of disturbance, I suppose. I don't think you have to go very far in literature for examples of it. 00:09:53:15 - 00:09:58:18 Unknown I suppose Don Quixote. 00:09:58:20 - 00:10:33:06 Unknown Is a great popular hero, and Flash Gordon and Superman, but we're now beginning to get her. I'm thinking now, this new show, the Star War, that is the new Hollywood thing that is based on Flash Gordon Comics, The Bionic Man, Bionic Woman. These are vicarious forms of violence in which young people are trying to discover, who am I? 00:10:33:08 - 00:10:44:27 Unknown I once asked to my granddaughter or one of our granddaughters, who was then six, what do you want to be when you grow up? And she said instantly, Bionic woman. 00:10:45:00 - 00:11:19:25 Unknown This is the kind of violence that permits one to discover who you are. I was using violence in a rather large sense of simply encounter abrasive encounters. Yes, in terms of the figure ground thesis that you put forward in city as classroom professor, in what way would the message that you've given us tonight be different? If this meeting, instead of being here in the Sydney Hilton Hotel, were, say, in the center of the Sydney Cricket ground. 00:11:19:27 - 00:11:31:00 Unknown Well, cricket is a very organized form of violence. 00:11:31:02 - 00:11:58:18 Unknown I would insist on studying the game of cricket as a manifestation of the controlled forms of violence in the community. Baseball or football, any kind of sport is a dramatization of the typical and accepted forms of violence in the business community. And so you can learn enormous amount about the business community by studying the rules and procedures in cricket or baseball or golf. 00:11:58:20 - 00:12:28:10 Unknown As far as that goes, the these are all these games are huge ways of discovering, dramatizing what the society Jordaan is all about. By the way, without an audience, these games would have no meaning at all. They have to be played in front of a public in order to acquire their meaning. A baseball game without an audience would be a rehearsal, only a practice. 00:12:28:13 - 00:12:54:12 Unknown The game requires a public, and the public has to resemble a whole cross-section of the community. I'm very interested in games as dramatizing of violent behavior. Conder control McLuhan saying, you know so much about cricket. The problem is where to put the commercials. Apparently, when you broadcast cricket, there's no way to put them. Does this mean the game has to change to fit television, or. 00:12:54:16 - 00:13:15:26 Unknown I have been paying attention to cricket in the last few days while I've been here, but it's a game that I did not grow up with, so I'm not a. You can't answer the question. Well, I'm not sure, but you say where to put the commercials for them anyway. Do you mean that it is so continuous garment? I see it as a seamless web. 00:13:15:28 - 00:13:30:15 Unknown I normally put them as the bit where all the theology of the game comes across, and all the inner thoughts. It was a woman. Yes. Thinks. 00:13:30:18 - 00:13:32:06 Unknown My question is a little bit of bad ad.