McLuhan’s note to Skornia from 6/7/59 made the all important point that “We can’t assume that we understand media already!” This was the chief meaning, addressed above all to McLuhan himself, of “the medium is the message”. This had many implications for the NAEB Understanding Media project he was then working on, not least in regard to the testing and demonstration of his general proposal to educational broadcasters. But it also captured the question at the heart of his life’s work: how to initiate open collective investigation of the shaping forces of the interior landscape?1
We are going to have to devise some new types of testing for non-verbal factors in attitude change resulting from various media. But isn’t this what the project is all about? We can’t assume that we understand media already! Exciting types of testing are [already available] via [such mechanical means as] the abstraction and isolating of single factors by segmental analysis and static snapshotting. I’m prepared to go into this bald-headed, Harry, and to push back frontiers in psychological testing just as much as we have done in other areas already. But I’ll gladly use all the available talent and savvy.
Later in the same note in its handwritten ending:
we are going to invent new forms of revealing and testing media uses. (…) We are not going to be content with existing methods of testing but won’t ignore them [either].2
- Strangely, McLuhan research has failed to follow his lead into a new research area, or areas, not because it is not collective enough, but because it is not open enough. It has established itself as Kuhn’s ‘normal science’ with professorial chairs, grad departments and journals, without going through the required first step of Gestalt-switch through which its focus would be established. It has not been able to attend his admonition that “we can’t assume that we understand media already” which would direct us through the RVM looking glass and “through the vanishing point”. Hence, instead of participating in the new world of Marconi, it is one of the forces attempting to perpetuate the tottering world of Gutenberg. This is no service to him. Far more important, it is no service to a world in desperate need of a “survival strategy”. ↩
- “What you can assure Walter Stone (of the US Office of Education) and (the NAEB Research) Committee is that we are going to invent new forms of revealing and testing media uses. We are in for as big a campaign as Dewey undertook. We are not going to be content with existing methods of testing but won’t ignore them (either).” ↩