Misunderstanding the Media's Laws

Author(s): Marshall McLuhan

Source: Technology and Culture, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Apr., 1976), p. 263
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the Society for the History
of Technology
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3103073
Accessed: 09/06/2009 05:47

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MISUNDERSTANDING THE MEDIA'S LAWS

To THE EDITOR:

Mr. Venable's response to my "Laws of the Media" is typical of the

difficulties people have with my writings.
For example, Venable attempts to relate my "tetrades," or laws, to
logic (the logic of C. S. Peirce). The whole point about my tetrades is
that they are analogical. That is, there are no connections between any
of them, but there are dynamic ratios. Everything that follows in
Venable's comments is equally remote from anything I have observed
or stated. He has not read me at all but has almost at random used my
observations as points from which to take off on his own flights. That
is, there is no disagreement between Venable and me; there is simply
no point of contact whatever.
By the way, I have just come across an invaluable book, Ecological
Psychology,by Roger G. Barker (Stanford, Calif., 1968). It was pointed
out to me by Edward T. Hall in The Fourth Dimension in Architecture
(Santa Fe, 1975), in which he notes: "The most pervasive and impor-
tant assumption, a cornerstone in the edifice of Western thought, is one
that lies hidden from our consciousness and has to do with man's rela-
tionship to his environment. Quite simply the Western view is that hu-
man processes, particularly behavior, are independent of environ-
mental controls and influence" (p. 7).
I appear to be the only person who knows why Western man played
up these assumptions about his immunity to environmental influence.
Of late, I have been studying more and more the kinds of response to
my own work, and there is a uniform response of hostility to any
study of psychic effects of technology. Strangely, non-Western man
does not take this attitude. The Hindu and the Japanese and the
African have welcomed my approach, without demur. As can be seen
in my book Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (New York, 1972), I
consider that Western man has been going Eastward and inward with
the electric revolution. That is, Western man is ceasing to be Western
and Eastern man is moving Westward, rapidly, with our technology
and hardware.

MARSHALL MCLUHAN*

*DR. MCLUHANis director of the Centre for Culture and Technology at the Univer-
sity of Toronto.

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