Time & Televisual Intersubjectivity, McLuhan’s idea of globalized presence as the prehistory of telecomputation. The 1960s was the decade in which satellite technology was introduced to the television world via a series of live broadcasts. However, with the active participation of 46 stations, BBC’s Our World (1967) was undoubtedly the most globally far reaching of them all. Conceived around Marshall McLuhan’s concept of the communicative global village, the special program took full advantage of satellites to both reach a truly global audience and use the occasion to announce the dawn of globalization and what living in a small and thoroughly connected world would mean for its inhabitants. Prominent in the broadcast was the program’s Canadian segment, which aired right after the introduction and included Marshal McLuhan interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and broadcast from their studio in Toronto.
Marshall McLuhan on ‘Our World’ global satellite broadcast (June 24th, 1967)
Transcription prepared by Manuel Correa & Olivia Leiter.
CBC: Good afternoon. This is the control room here in Toronto where viewers in Canada will see our world this afternoon. It’s one of forty-five control rooms around the world, linking the world, or the developed world, in this first global television program. I have with me in the control room professor Marshall McLuhan, the so called prophet of this electronic communication age. I hope you don’t object to that word, “prophet”, you must be tired of it.
MML: I’m quite helpless.
CBC: I don’t know if you know what is going around here professor, McLuhan. I don’t.
MML: Its a real humming, buzzing confusion.
CBC: Can you say what message the medium has on the world this afternoon?
MML: Well, I can say right off for example that everyone will look at this program as if it were something they have already seen before, with just a little addition of this and that, because that is the inevitable way in which we look at everything. It’s the same old thing with a little item or two added. In fact, what is happening around the world today, is what has happened with the [Montreal] expo: a huge mosaic has been created in which, in effect, an x-ray of world cultures, not a story-line, not a perspective, not a point of view, but a kind of x-ray through this mosaic, is created in which everybody can participate. Everybody is surprised at expo at how deeply they appreciate and participate in the show. Nobody seems to realize why it is so unlike other world fairs. And I think this show this afternoon will have some unexpected repercussions in that way. People will be drawn into it as participants, whereas they are merely viewing themselves as spectators at this moment.
CBC: Doesn’t this, though, it’s creating a entirely new intellectual spirit, climate, for those who can communicate. Doesn’t it present another problem of dividing those who can from those who can’t?
MML: Well, what is called for example a generation gap today, the TV generation of kids, have a completely different set of perceptions from their parents. Their parents grew up in a visual world like the world of movies, where they have cameras and pictures and points of view. The kids have grown up in an x-ray world. The TV camera does a perpetual job of x-ray on them and they take this for granted. X-ray means depth, x-ray means participation in depth in whatever they are doing, and calls for a totally new kind of commitment to everything they are doing. That is why when they encounter situations in which they are merely classified entities as in the school room, they don’t feel wanted, they don’t feel needed, they just drop out. Now, this strange, new all-at-once situation in which everybody experiences everything all at once creates this kind of x-ray mosaic of involvement and participation for which people are just not prepared. They have lived through centuries of detachment, of non-involvement, Suddenly they are involved. So it’s a big surprise, and for many people a kind of exhilaration. Wonderful!
CBC: But there are people in the world, the majority, who don’t live in this new, involved society, and they are still in the age of the camel–
MML: They are trying to live in the rear-view mirror. They are still desperately trying to get an image of themselves in a situation that is familiar and known, whereas in actual fact the situation that they find themselves in is not well known, it’s utterly surprising and terrifying. The people have always, in all ages, Stan, have always been terrified of the present. The only people that seem to have enough gumption, or nerve, to look at what is happening right under their nose are artists. They are specialists in sensory life. They just deliberately look at the present, you know, as if they dared it to ruin, or do something to them. They are like Perseus and the Gorgon. The artist looks into the mirror of art and says, the heck with the gorgon’s image, I’m not terrified. But most people simply expect, when they look at the present, to be turned to stone, as by the gorgon’s spell, and they are terrified. Therefore they prefer the rear-view mirror. Nearly everybody who looks ahead, as it were, is in effect looking at the rear-view mirror, and if people try to prophesize about today’s show, they will be steadfastly looking in the rear-view mirror.
CBC: But we are…nevertheless, as you have said, those of us who participate in this new society, this electric society, it is a new sense of awareness and involvement, but, my question is this: the majority of the world’s people in our satellites are going around the world today, are completely out of it. The cameras don’t reach them, they don’t hear the message–
MML: They aren’t watching the show at all.
CBC: And they are not in the rear-view mirror, they are in the past, centuries, and isn’t that gap widening as our rocket-like society goes forward?
MML: You know, something like [the] expo, though, creates a mosaic of all those societies as well as all the latest ones, and everything happens at the same moment. You can be in Beirut, or in Tokyo, or in New York at the same moment, in this kind of mosaic world of all-at-onceness, and so, in effect, the backwards countries have to become contemporary simply because of this instantaneous quality of the mosaic. To be brought into the show, they are all participants. It’s no longer a question of philanthropy or just do-gooderism. They just realize these people are part of the show and they have to get into the act, until we put on their makeup or something they can’t go before the camera, so, the whole backward territories of the world are being upgraded at very high speed. In fact, one of our most mistaken efforts in upgrading is warfare, because when you fight a backward country you in a sense educate it to hurry its education up into the present. That’s the way Julius Caesar did it.
CBC: But didn’t we just see an example in the Middle East where one nation had an army which was a complete master of this mechanized society, fighting another which was mentally caught in a camel age.
MML: You can see that the generation gap there, or the technological gap, created frustration (inaudible) even though the war didn’t.
CBC: You are confident that these nations, the backwards nations who are not yet in the electric age, they are in the transition to radio age, as you have already pointed out, but–
MML: But you see, in our own homes, the generation gap between child and parent is fantastically great, but we always accepted that as a normal, natural growth gap. Now, today, because of an enormous speed up of information, the child is becoming an adult, the adult has to acquire all the empathy and intuition of childhood in order to live with his own children. The gap between adult and child is just disappearing overnight. That is as big as any revolution as any backwards country has to face when it’s being updated into the twentieth century. The biggest revolutions in the world are taking place under our own roofs, at our dinner tables. This all-at-onceness just wipes out the old distances and times between age groups, ethnic groups, civilized groups and so on. This kind of speed up enables you, for example, at expo, to see all the cultures of the world, in x-ray form, in depth, what you encounter at expo is not history, but the immediate experience of these countries. You walk into a pavilion and you experience them not as they were, or they will be, but as they are, as an immediate experience, as immediate as the smell of a cigarette.
CBC: Id like to, on this day, when Mr. Kosygin and President Johnson, are meeting at Westborough to look back at a comment you made back a number of years ago, around eleven years ago I think , you pointed out the differences mentally between a print society, and the newer oral, the electric society. You made the interesting observation that the United States and the Soviet Union are the two great countries which came to greatness in the era of the printing press. Do you–
MML: Well, no I’m not sure that I wish to say just that. The United States is entirely a product of the printing press. Russia had many centuries of history before print, and still has huge commitments…
CBC: But the soviet Communist society is a printing press-minded organization–
MML: Ah, ah! Right, the 1917 October revolution was entirely the result of the print technology of that era. Yes.
CBC: But do you find in those two countries today, any indications of, perhaps, the problems they inherited from the printing press?
MML: Oh yeah, because the United States is always looking for blueprints and always looking for solutions in forms of classified data. This, of course, is utterly alien to Russian culture with its oral traditions of involvement, and so there are great gaps, culture gaps, between the US and Russia. The Russians haven’t had time to become completely permeated with print culture by any means.
CBC: Did you by any chance see Mr Barouni, the delegate from Saudi Arabia speaking the complete arab oral–
MML: No, and a man who resented the coming of the European civilized blueprint into the arab world imposing on them. What we considered, that is the way we have always thought of civilization, giving the benefits of civilization to Africa has always come down to print oriented people as the laying down of new blueprints, new times for work and education, programming, but today it has to be done by dialogue, by a completely new kind of involvement and participation in their problems. And the old blueprint method is disappearing without questions. Television is a x-ray not a blueprint, so it goes right inside problems, inside cultures, in depth. There are so many numerous stories that express the grievances and the tensions that arise from these situations. I wish we had time to rehearse them.
CBC: I’m afraid that our time is up. I’ve got to get down to the studio. Many thanks, Professor McLuhan.
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Watch the interview here: