Culture is our Business, book by Marshall McLuhan, 1970

Partial Excerpts

This book is not about ads (advertising), but about our time.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Like cave paintings, ads are not intended to be looked at or seen, but rather to exert influence ata distance, as though by ESP.

The twentieth century, the age of electric information, instant retrieval and total involvement, is a new tribal time.

Today, through ads, a child takes in all the times and places of the world “with his mother's TV." He is gray at three. By twelve he isa confirmed Peter Pan, fully aware of the follies of adults and adult life in general.

In the world of the new global theatre, everybody has to "do his thing"". Role-playing supplants job-holding just as knowledge supplants experience. Newton discovered not gravity, but levity (outward pull). The reader of this book will discover much levity in the patterns of force of ads that shape and mirror our time.

Tranquilizers enable people to persist in their ordinary activities while leading lives of howling desperation.

Advertisers must now confront the opposition of tranquilizers in suburbia. Suburbanites are so hopped up that the TV ad, quack and all, rolls off their backs like a duck.

At slow rates of change the maladjusted person is a local “character.” At high speeds he is a neurotic menace. For the same reason the artist occupies the ivory tower in slow- changing society. He moves to the control tower in a rapidly changing world. He alone can see the present clearly enough to navigate.

When the entire world becomes accessible at these speeds, "travel” means getting to the airport.

The East goes outer with our old hardware as fast as we go on the inner cosmic trip of oriental fantasy with our new electric circuits and circuses. The West has "discovered" the I Ching and a concern with the processes of hidden environments. “The foremost newspaper in Japan” beckons to the Western producer: "Your Japan market is the ‘Mass Elite.’ ”

The prayer mat replaces the Cadillac.

The steamship and the railroad created the centralized metropolis. The motorcar (automobile) dismembered it into suburbia. The jet plane simply by-passes it, leaving it to become a ghetto.

One of the many flips of our time is that the electric information environment returns man to the condition of the most primitive prober and hunter. Privacy invasion is now one of our biggest knowledge industries.

HOSE-AND-LADDER DIVISION

War and violence result from breakdowns in conventional images of identity. "War is education.” (War and Peace in the Global Village)

The hose-and-ladder division of the clothing indusiry creates even more consumer involvement and attention than the nearest fire. The hosiery gap cries out for closure. If is a fermenting interface of escalated change.

All discoveries in art and science result from an accumulation of errors. Antisepsis was achieved in the late nineteenth century when anesthesia and the greater prevalence of surgery had created a mounting death rate.

Alexander Graham Bell, while trying to remove defects from the telegraph, discovered the telephone.

The New York garbage strike revealed the container corporations as the creators of the new American environment.

As any executive climbs up the echelons of the organization chart, his involvement in the organization becomes less and less.
At the top he is a dropout, like the head of a country.

Today, if anyone wishes to head a big organization, he must be “discovered” at the head of a small one. He cannot come up from inside. There are too many fragmented specialisms.

ONE OF THE NICEST THINGS ABOUT BEING BIG IS THE LUXURY OF THINKING LITTLE

Nixon Cools Korean Violence. (Headline, April 17 /69) A big country can't afford to get angry with little countries.

If psychoanalysis was the need for emotional adjustment resulting from accelerated social change, operations research forced creativity upon the entire business world because of the need to anticipate problems with solutions.

In Operations Research, as in creating a whodunit, you start with the solution and organize ignorance, not knowledge. In O.R. teams, experts are excluded. They know it can't be done. In avant-garde art, as in modern ads, you start with the effect. The product that produces the effect comes later.

“The Vietnam war results from the loss of identity of the U.S.A. as a business civilization. (Robert Theobold)

Every massive technological innovation creates new environments that destroy national and corporate images.

World War I was a railway war of centralism and encirclement. World War II was a radio war of decentralism. World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation. (From "War and Peace in the Global Village" 1968)

The entire Western world is going East (tribal) and inward. The East is detribalizing—going West and outward. No such macroscopic revolution ever occurred before. All identity images, private and corporate, dissolve. Violent struggle to regain these images ensues.