Essential McLuhan 48 “IF IT WEREN’T FOR EDISON, WE’D BE WATCHING TV BY CANDLELIGHT” The invisibility of color TV, the supposition that it has some relation to black-and-white TV has proved a corker. Siegfried Giedion’s phrase: “anonymous history” (in introducing Space-Time & Architecture) was an attempt to cope with the difficulty of introducing a new design form to people imbued with many unconscious habits of perception. Color is not so much a visual as a tactile medium (as Harley Parker and I explain in To the Vanishing Point; Space in Poetry and Painting). The cones of the eye in interface create the experience of color: “The center or macula lutea of the eye is responsive to hue and texture. The periphery, on the other hand, is concerned with darkness and lightness and also with movement…. The macula and the periphery work in tandem. However, peripheral vision can exist by itself. While color vision is inclusive, black-and-white is partial. (The potential of any technology is always dissipated by its user’s involvement in its predecessor.) The iconic thrust of color W will be buried under mountains of old pictorial space.” On the back of this ad from TV Guide (June 8/68) Neil Hickey reports that “television is under attack for failing to communicate with the Negro;…” Color TV, far more than black-and-white, gives the Negro easy dominance over the white man’s image. Hickey is doing the usual. Ignoring the medium and watching the content.