Richard Kahn

Notes for Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

Chapters 23,28,29

Chapter 23 - Ads (Keeping Upset with the Joneses)

I. The continuous pressure is to create ads…more in the image of audience motives and desires…The product matters less. (226)

II. Evolution of media that has evolved advertising, now ads are evolving media forms.

III. Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brain-washing (227).

• Ads attempt to crudely automate society — the goal is programmed harmony of human impulses, aspirations and endeavors.

• TV has created more consciousness of the unconscious (it makes us more aware that an ad is an ad?) and so advertisers have had to change style — to humor.

IV. Ad campaigns are a second form of national education.

• A society's real history is condensed into the ad — it is a vigorous dramatization of communal experience. No group of sociologists can approximate the ad teams in the gathering and processing of exploitable social data.

  1. Ads are essentially pictorial, not textual.

    2. • Initially, photoengraving allowed ads and pictures to merge — this was a huge boom.

    • Would it not seem natural and necessary that the young be provided with at least as much training of perception in this graphic and photographic world as they get in the typographic? In fact, they need more training in graphics, because the art of casting and arranging actors in ads is both complex and forcefully insidious. (230)

    • The photo and TV seduce us from the literate and private "point of view" to the complex and inclusive world of the group icon…it is for everybody or nobody. (230-31).

    • Verbal critique misses the depth-appeal of ads as nonverbal image presentation. Typepography, like graphics, is subliminal as a medium-message.

  2. Movies are non-stop ads for the american way of life.

    3. • Movie stars are the ultimate promotions and promotion vehicles.

  3. Radio led ads to the singing commercial.

• Noise and nausea as a technique of achieving unforgettability became universal.

Chapter 28 - The Phonograph (The Toy That Shrank the National Chest)

  1. Takes up the phonograph as an icon for an entire developmental process that highlights both criss-crossing technologies and the transition of the mechanical to the electric age.

    2. • Initially conceived of as a means of storing spoken information (via telephone) as written code into disc.

    • Edison gained idea from playing telegraph at high speed.

    • Was non-electric: required mechanical function.

  2. Phonograph rises to fame as a tool for entertainment — universalizes new rhythms in music, poetry and dance.

    3. • Failure to perceive the entertainment uses of phonograph is the failure to grasp the meaning of the electric revolution in general.

    • Entertainment pushed to the extreme becomes the main form of business and politics. (277)

    • The brief and compressed history of the phonograph includes all phases of the written, the printed, and the mechanized word. It was the advent of the electric tape recorder that only a few years ago released the phonograph from its temporary involvment in mechanical culture. (277)

  3. As technology moves to electric automation, labor specialization disappears into diversity.

• Electric logic is embodied by telegraph and telephone (i.e. phonograph): recovery of vocal, auditory, and mimetic world that print age had surpressed. New rhythms.

• Jazz is tribal discontinuity, improvisational and conversational — the product is the performance. This could not have happened in print-age music, where the product was the score.

IV. Phonograph sets in motion the electricity of sound that leads to radio, tape, then cd, mp3., etc. It involves a quest for "tactile or kinetic" — visceral and synthasthetic. It delivers humanity unto nomadicism — gathering information everywhere.

Chapter 29 - Movies (The Reel World)

I. Movies involve integration of mechanism and organicity. Print, picture and motor.

• The business of the writer or the film-maker is to transfer the reader or viewer from one world, his own, to another, the world created by typography and film. This is accepted subliminaly and without critical awareness. (285)

• Movies are cross of non-verbal experience with high literacy.

- Literate audiences assume uniform continuity of space and time, and so project themselves into the film easily. Non-literate audiences experience the happening of the film itself as magic.

• One must fix one's eyes properly to a film to achieve its whole effect. One must also downplay multi-sensory interaction with a film based on print culture.

- However, just as print has led to film development, film is affecting print and tribalizing it.

- We can measure the psychic pressure of typography by the uproar generated by the modern release from uniformity and continuity in space/time. (289)

II. Film is gestaltic — it presents a large body of information as a whole-in-depth. Print cannot easily approach the movie in this respect.

III. As film is adapted by different cultures, different film techniques have evolved.

• Eisenstein and the Russian school — film as juxtaposition rather than connectivity.

IV. Film is the supreme expression of mechanism — of getting ready to live. Thus, the film commodifies magic and dreams.

• Political implications of this for class society and global village. Film as creative ad for the 1st consumer age.

V. Movies, like all technologies, have been part and parcel of evolving technologic forms and so social/psychological form.

• Movement to the personalized, interactive, electric stream-of-consciousness experience of our own experience.