Essential McLuhan 362 hemisphere. There is no way to quantify the right hemisphere, which emphasizes inner and qualitative aspects of experience. How paradoxical that the hardware channels of radio and telephonic communication contribute to an extraordinary software effect. Nathaniel Hawthorne was 5 Herbert Krugman, from a paper delivered to the annual conference of the Advertising Research Foundation, October 1978. Cf. also, Barry Siegel, “Stay Tuned for How TV Scrambles Your Brain,” in The Miami Herald, C10. Krugman’s original report was presented as a paper to the annual conference (1970) of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. particularly sensitive to the implications of electric information and not infrequently remarked on them, as in The House of the Seven Gables: “Is it a fact that …by means of electricity the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it!” When people are on the telephone or on the air, they have no physical bodies but are translated into abstract images. Their old physical beings are entirely irrelevant to the new situations. The discarnate user of electric media bypasses all former spatial restrictions and is present in many places simultaneously as a disembodied intelligence. This puts him one step above angels, who can only be in one place at a time. Since, however, discarnate man has no relation to natural law (or to Western lineality), his impulse is towards anarchy and lawlessness. Minus his body, the user of telephone or radio or TV also is minus his private identity, an effect that is becoming increasingly evident. In another experiment, an audience was equally divided, with each half seated facing a translucent-opaque screen placed in the middle of a room. A movie was shown, and then the audience was asked to write a brief response. One group saw light reflected from the screen in the usual manner; the other group saw light passing through the screen, as with television. In their remarks, the “light-on” group adopted an objective, detached tone, and was analytic as to narrative, continuity, cinematography, editing and workmanship, and so on. Whereas they reported “how the movie looked,” by contrast, the “light-through” group was mainly concerned with “how the movie felt.” Their responses were subjective and emotional: they discussed themselves, how they felt, and the mystical or archetypal significance of characters or actions. The differences between the light-on and the light-through situations (immediate ground) were sufficiently potent to cause one group to have a right-hemisphere experience and the other to have a left-hemisphere experience. With the low-intensity mosaic TV image, this effect is greatly amplified.