Text and television in McLuhan's global village

I revisited the work of Marshall McLuhan recently. The patron saint of Wired Magazine prophesied the triumph of video over print some 40 years before YouTube, but he died in 1980, too soon to see himself proved (sort of) right.

The pop-culture prophet becomes a pop-culture cliché: Marshall McLuhan (right) in Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977).

McLuhan was an English Literature professor at the University of Toronto whose 1951 book The Mechanical Bride:Folklore of Industrial Man was among the first to view popular culture through a scholar's eye.
He achieved notoriety outside of academic circles with the publication of The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man in 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy introduced his theory that written language, and by extension printing, imposed a linear template on the thought process of all Western society.
In 1964 he took this idea further in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Television was so ubiquitous and so immediate, it would reverse the dominance of print and linear thinking: "The mass media of today are turning the globe into a village and catapulting 20th century man back to the life of the tribe." This notion lent momentum to the emerging 60s counterculture, but unlike his commune-dwelling admirers, McLuhan didn't completely endorse the return to the primitive. "Terror is the normal state of any oral society," he wrote, and that puts the inhabitants of the global village at the mercy of "Big Brother."

A spread from McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967), a 160-page paperback created in collaboration with graphic designer Quentin Fiore. Long on images and avant-garde typography and light on content, the book made McLuhan a bona fide celebrity.

McLuhan lacked the scholar's cool detachment from his subject. He envisioned television as an engine of social change. "Television completes the cycle of the human sensorium. [It] demands participation and involvement in depth of the whole being. It will not work as a background. It engages you," he wrote in 1967's The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. He continued:

It is a matter of greatest urgency that our educational institutions realize that we we now have civil war among these environments created by media other than the printed word. The classroom is now in a vital struggle for survival in the immensely persuasive 'outside' world created by new information media. Education must shift from instruction . . . to discovery--to probing and exploration and to the recognition of the language of forms.

He had to admit, though, that television promotes consumption more than discovery: "Today, the mass audience (the successor to 'the public') can be used as creative, participating force. It is, instead, merely given packages of passive entertainment."
He was naively hopeful that television would create more engaged citizens: "The living room has become a voting booth. Participation via television . . . is changing everything." Everything changed all right, but not the way McLuhan imagined.
Written language drew the line between gossip and news, and television erased that line. Pre-literate people probably didn't care about distant wars or global politics, but they were always eager to know who cheated on his wife, who got falling-down drunk, and what provocative remarks the preacher made--the stuff that television does best.
In McLuhan's Utopia, media would engage us in the life of the community. He was right that print often fails to do that, because it's one-way, top-down communication. Television wasn't the answer, though, because it's top-down too. What he was trying to invent was fully interactive media--something akin to Web 2.0. What he couldn't imagine was how successfully the new participatory media would integrate the core of the old media--text. Freed from the printed page, writing is no longer rigidly linear. It can flow seamlessly into pictures, sounds, or other text strands.
In 1967, McLuhan and graphic designer Quentin Fiore tried to achieve this non-linearity within the confines of print in an issue of Aspen, "the magazine in a box," which will be the subject of the next PublishingMojo post.

Getting it right away, getting it right

The Guardian recently wrote about a study titled Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future, published in January 2008. The report was written Dr. Ian Rowlands and colleagues at the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research. They must have been up all night coming up with a name that fit the acronym CIBER.
The study was commissioned by the British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee, so it's no shock that the report emphasizes what libraries must do to ensure their survival in the face of other media competing for the researcher of the future's dwindling attention span. The report's authors display admirable reserve (they're British, after all), but they tip their hand on the title page, with a big photo of a child staring at a computer screen with nostrils flared, teeth bared, and for good measure, mad-scientist hair.
Research libraries rightly fear becoming obsolete if search engines and online information resources outperform them at their own job. The report defends the library by suggesting that readers, in their desire to get information right away, often fail to get it right.
It argues first that online researchers find good information, but they don't read it. "Around 60 per cent of e-journal users view no more than three pages and a majority (up to 65 per cent) never return. . . . The average times that users spend on e-book and ejournal sites are very short: typically four and eight minutes respectively. . . . users `power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins." I admit I'm busted, I didn't read every word of the report. But I was power browsing in college back in the 20th Century. Surely it's no surprise to Dr. Rowlands et al. that researchers often stop reading after they've found the information they need, even when they're using hard-copy sources.
Expanding on the subject of what we don't read, the report laments the tendency of academics to "squirrel away content in the form of downloads [but] there is no evidence as to the extent to which these downloads are actually read." This is another bad habit that folks had centuries before the Internet made it easy and cheap. Most book-filled homes and offices contain scores of unread or partially-read volumes.
The second argument the report advances is that content found online is less reliable than that found in libraries, or that users can't tell the difference. "Users assess authority and trust for themselves in a matter of seconds by dipping and cross-checking across different sites and by relying on favoured brands (e.g. Google)." Traditional scholarship has always been backed by the guarantee of peer reviews--"peer" in this case being the author's peer, not the reader's. Readers of the Google generation are too quick to trust the imprimatur of their own peers, but libraries won't lure researchers back into the stacks by impugning all web content. In academic and professional circles, the web is evolving its own equivalent of peer review, and intelligent readers quickly learn to recognize the writers with sound ideas, and to ignore the quacks and hacks.
The CIBER team sees a tidal wave of suspect information threatening to drown the libraries, so they throw them an anvil. "Libraries are handicapped here by a lack of brand . . . Publishers are better able to offer something here with their strong commercial and academic brands and their rapidly expanding ‘walled garden’ information products, and strategic partnerships should be considered." The publishers can't stop this particular deluge; they're already in it far over their heads. And anyway, they've already created a brand--books--that Google regards as the gold standard for "highest-quality knowledge," as Sergey Brin said last year in a New Yorker interview.
Google lets readers get information right away. Often they get it right, too. But Google has no interest in preserving information for readers of the 22nd or 23rd Centuries. No business can wait 200 years to see a return on its investment. That's why libraries won't, and mustn't, become obsolete. Their stakeholders are not just the power-browsing scholars of the present, but those of the future. Nobody finds current information better than Google. But someday Google will be just a footnote in a volume of history, and it won't even be that unless someone is preserving volumes of history. Nobody does that better than the British Library.

What is publishing mojo?

In a 2007 interview Marissa Mayer, the vice-president in charge of the Google Books project, told The New Yorker magazine, "If we provide access to books we are going to get much higher-quality and much more reliable information. We are moving up the food chain." Google's co-founder Sergey Brin echoed this view: "Comprehensiveness [is] about having the really high-quality information. You have thousands of years of human knowledge, and probably the highest-quality knowledge is captured in books."
Why does the search-engine giant Google look to books for the highest-quality knowledge? It's publishing mojo. Publishers created a model that still can't be improved on:

• To search and select the best ideas from around the world
• To present them in a clear and attractive design
• To deliver them in a convenient and affordable format
• To preserve them for the future.

For centuries books have been the vehicle for the best that human culture has to offer. Now we have other vehicles, but we still need publishing mojo: the conviction that what we are making is valuable, and deserves all the care and creativity we can muster.