The global theatre ‘At very high speeds all forms become recognizable as. patterns. At that moment they become art forms. The moment a pattern recognition is achieved then the thing is an art form, The movies became an art form with the advent of television. Television is not an art form yet, and will not become an art form until it has been scrapped by a new technology. Nature —the planet itself —has been scrapped by the satellite environment, and as you scrap nature you turn the earth itself into an art form. This creates an awareness of the problem of pollution and a demand for universal programming of the total planetary environment. ‘Spaceship earth has now to be programmed totally as a human environment, thanks to the satellite sur- round. This type of scrapping one environment and, then being faced with a demand to treat it as an art form has gone on through the centuries. It has usually missed the planner’s attention. Just as television programmers still work with the movie techniques and ignore the fact that television is a totally different sort of medium from the cinema, so you find that the Planners of the spaceship earth continue to work with metropolitan concepts. There are an amazing number of technological fac- tors that make and unmake cities. For example, steam- boats and railways created huge metropolitan ag- gregations of hardware and marketing. Then, with the motor car, these metropolitan areas were torn to pieces and flung out into the suburbs. Then the need Marshall McLuhan for the suburb to come back into the metropolitan area created another kind of dynamic which we associate with the expressway problem. This in turn is out moded by the airplane which in effect creates a planetary city: Tokyo isn't much further away than the suburbs in point of time. The patterns of human as- sociation vary enormously with the amount of acceler- ation possible and in fact you could say that, with the satellites, the global village has become a global theatre with everybody on our planet simultaneously participant as actors. When you fly an airplane around a city you demand, that the city becomes an art form. The highway really belongs to the old hardware. The motor car and the expressway have nothing to do with the new needs of the city as an art form. They see it through a rear view mirror —a retrogressive view. If you put express- ways into an already overcrowded area this has nothing to do with solving the problem of the city as an art form. It is a repetition of the old nineteenth century technology as a solution. Today people have given up talking about living and only talk about transit. They no longer think about dialogue, human community, neighbourhood. It's an amazing omission, and it’s the result of looking at the present through a nineteenth century image. There is an old saying in the business world: «If it works it must be obsolete». It's only when a thing has become obsolete that everybody has got sut- This article is extracted from an interview with Or. Marshall McLuhan conducted by Edward Fitzgerald for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1970. kistics 190, Sept, 1971 :ficiently familiar with it to make it work, Motor cars, were obsolete long ago, but that means they are really going concerns today. (There is more handwriting today than there was before Gutenberg). Obsoles- cence does not mean the conclusion but rather the beginning of a process as far as everyday life is con- cerned. This is not ordinarily understood. Most people think obsolescence means the end, It means the beginning. People always live in obsolescent frames of mind and obsolescent technologies. Only the artist can afford to live in the present, and for that privilege he pays a very heavy price The artist is the only person whose antennae pick up messages before anybody else. So he is always thought of as being way ahead of his time because he lives in the present. There are very many reasons why most people prefer to live in an age just behind them. It's safer. To live right on the shooting line, right on the frontier of change, is terrifying. The new electric technology has destroyed the American image of itself. The country is falling apart, physically and politically, because of the speed of information. The American bureaucracy, politics and education were set up for the very slow speeds of the printed word and railways. At electric speeds nothing in the U.S.A. makes sense. Early America smashed the mediaeval hierarchies of loyalties and set up the individualist — the isolated man—as the material from which to construct the state, America began with the printed word and with the latest technology — the assembly line in industry and in education. With elec- tricity all that ends. The American image of itself, ‘American goals, American directions, have been scrapped by electric speeds. | am not making value judgments. 1 am simply observing that if you ac- celerate any structure beyond a certain speed it col- lapses. Our postal systems have collapsed because of the telephone and telex. Our bureaucracies have become police states, The most benign political de- mocracy becomes a police state as soon as you im- prove the speed of communication. Everybody then comes under surveillance, everybody is put into a data bank. There is no freedom left. I know no psychologist or sociologist who has re- cognized that technologies radically change the organs of human perception, and therefore totally change people's image of themselves and of others. When an image of any identity changes, one struggles violently either to recover the old one or to build up a new one. Therefore ages of rapid technological change are ages of violence: violence being the means of destroying the old and creating the new image of identity. It is like the tragic hero who is always in quest of a goal—a new image of identity — which can only be achieved through suffering and violence. Today we live in an age of the most violent changes in human history The primitive countries get the latest technologies first, They start with radio. Because it's cheaper and faster, they get electricity before they get nineteenth 182 century industrial hardware, The old nineteenth cen- tury hardware, necessary for producing goods, etc. in these countries, takes a long time to put in. The United Nations is giving free transistor radios to all the backward countries of the world. The effect is to releases enormous tribal violence, because radio intensities all the activities of their ear-culture, which is the culture by which they live already. Radio in the Middle East and Africa is an immediate cause of violence, because it steps up consciousness of them- selves and of the interfaces among themselves to a very high pitch. It's like giving them very strong booze. Tribal societies cannot touch alcohol because they are already so keyed up as communities — as tribal groups —that the sort of increased social activity that comes from alcohol is just poison to them. On the other hand a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon American) is so individualistic —so up-tignt — that he needs ‘an awful lot of booze in order just to be human at all Electric technology has retrieved the primitive coun- tries of the world and made them a part of us. The Gutenberg technology scrapped mediaeval culture and retrieved antiquity. Electric technology scrapped nineteenth century hardware in industry and retrieved primitive society en masse, dumping them into the Western lap. As a result, the Western kids today are primitives without identity. Without the old-fashioned private identity they have become tribal. Being tribal, role-seeking and group-oriented, they are very violent because they are being asked to fit into a highly bureaucratized and specialized world of the nineteenth century hangover. They can't. At electric speeds it is impossible to fit into those specialized spots created by a slower technology, called «jobs». The whole job structure of our society has collapsed. There is not one bureaucracy in the world today that is functioning. In a recent book called Runaway World, E.R. Leach pointed out that, until the First World War, what we call the nuclear family (mom, pop and the kids) was un- known. Itwas the railways above all that made it easy for people to settle away from the area in which they were born. What we call the modern family is a very recent event, and now it is already gone. The frag- mented family of mom, pop and the kids, which puts people under the most fierce psychic strains —of ‘one-to-one relationships — has now disappeared. Mr Freud has disappeared also because the new family is a group entity and his psychology was for private problems. In an electric information environment, the old schoolroom or college classroom becomes an im- Poverished, underprivileged territory. The amount of information available in the schoolroomis extremely poor compared to what the student can pick up out- side it. The scholars of the middle ages found more information by wandering around from one university to another than they could by staying in any one place. Our kids today are returning to this state of wandering scholars. The drop-out is a person who is trying to get back in touch, Nobody gets in touch until he has Exists 190, Sept, 1971dropped out. The person who is tied to a job is really hung up. When he dropped out of the presidency, L.B. Johnson admitted that he was trying to get back in touch with reality. This is the Peter Principle: the higher you go on the organization chart, the less competent you are. Those who achieve the highest office are of the utmost level of incompetence. The whole tendency of technology is toward selt- awareness and the heightening of self-awareness. Up to now we have tended to live by matching and initation and copying and mass production and homo- genization. With the computer it is possible to pro- gram a machine to make eighty different pipes or cars at the same speed and the same cost. So the ten- dency of a speeded up electric technology is toward individual tailor-made services. We are moving into ‘a new type of service environment in which the in- dividual can become notjust a learner but a researcher and a discoverer. There are no passengers on space ship earth— only crew. There are no spectators with global theatre Ekistics 190, Sept. 1971 —only actors. Under electric conditions of speed, all forms of work have to become creative in order to function atall, The present demand is for role playing —for a total involvement in one’s work, so that the work itself becomes play and leisure, This is the Privilege enjoyed by the artist. When the artist is working at his hardest he is playing the hardest. Role playing means involvement in a pattern of ac- tivity in which there is great satisfaction for the per- former even though there is self-effacement. He achieves a fulfillment through merging with a much larger function than himself. This type of communal role playing has already become normal. In business the job holder has disappeared in favour of the image: the private individual in politics has disappeared in favour of the image; the star system in entertainment has disappeared in favour of the corporate image in which the audience can participate. The audience becomes actor and participant and a sharer of the learning process instead of just a recipient consumer at the end of a package deal. 183,