Essential McLuhan 172 high moral tone is the counter-strategy of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, whose nonsense has proved exceedingly durable. While the Lord Cardigans were taking their blood baths in the Valley of Death, Gilbert and Sullivan were announcing that the boundary break had been passed. Hybrid Energy Les Liaisons Dangereuses “For most of our lifetime civil war has been raging in the world of art and entertainment…. Moving pictures, gramophone records, radio, talking pictures….” This is the view of Donald McWhinnie, analyst of the radio medium. Most of this civil war affects us in the depths of our psychic lives, as well, since the war is conducted by forces that are extensions and amplifications of our own beings. Indeed, the interplay among media is only another name for this civil war that rages in our society and our psyches alike. “To the blind all things are sudden,” it has been said. The crossings or hybridizations of the media release great new force and energy as by fission or fusion. There need be no blindness in these matters once we have been notified that there is anything to observe. It has now been explained that media, or the extensions of man, are “make happen” agents, but not “make aware” agents. The hybridizing or compounding of these agents offers an especially favorable opportunity to notice their structural components and properties. “As the silent film cried out for sound, so does the sound film cry out for color,” wrote Sergei Eisenstein in his Notes of a Film Director. This type of observation can be extended systematically to all media: “As the printing press cried out for nationalism, so did the radio cry out for tribalism.” These media, being extensions of ourselves, also depend upon us for their interplay and their evolution. The fact that they do interact and spawn new progeny has been a source of wonder over the ages. It need baffle us no longer if we trouble to scrutinize their action. We can, if we choose, think things out before we put them out. Plato, in all his striving to imagine an ideal training school, failed to notice that Athens was a greater school than any university even he could dream up. In other words, the greatest school had been put out for human use before it had been thought out. Now, this is especially true of our media. They are put out long before they are thought out. In fact, their being put outside us tends to cancel the possibility of their being thought of at all. Everybody notices how coal and steel and cars affect the arrangements of daily existence. In our time, study has finally turned to the medium of language itself as shaping the arrangements of daily life, so that society
Essential McLuhan Page 178 Page 180