A few seconds from a popular diskjockey show were typed out as
follows:
That's Patty Baby and that's the girl with the dancing feet and
that's Freddy Cannon there on the David Mickie Show in the night
time ooohbah scubadoo how are you booboo. Next we'll be Swinging
on a Star and sssshhhwwoooo and sliding on a moonbeam.
Waaaaaaa how about that. . . one of the goodest guys with you . .
. this is lovable kissable D.M. in the p.m. at 22 minutes past
nine o'clock there, aahhrightie, we're gonna have a Hitline, all
you have to do is call WAlnut 5 1151, WAlnut 51151, tell them
what number it is on the Hitline.
Dave Mickie alternately soars, groans, swings, sings, solos,
intones, and scampers, always reacting to his own actions. He
moves entirely in the spoken rather than the written area of
experience. It is in this way that audience participation is
created. The spoken word involves all of the senses dramatically,
though highly literate people tend to speak as connectedly and
casually as possible. The sensuous involvement natural to
cultures in which literacy is not the ruling form of experience
is sometimes indicated in travel guides, as in this item from a
guide to Greece:
You will notice that many Greek men seem to spend a lot of time
counting the beads of what appear to be amber rosaries. But these
have no religious significance. They are komboloia or "worry
beads," a legacy from the Turks, and Greeks click them on
land, on the sea, in the air to ward off that insupportable
silence which threatens to reign whenever conversation lags.
Shepherds do it, cops do it, stevedores and merchants in their
shops do it. And if you wonder why so few Greek women wear beads,
you'll know it's because their husbands have preempted them for
the simple pleasure of clicking. More aesthetic than
thumbtwiddling, less expensive than smoking, this Queeglike
obsession indicates a tactile sensuousness characteristic of a
race which has produced the western world's greatest sculpture .
. .
Where the heavy visual stress of literacy is lacking in a
culture, there occurs another form of sensuous involvement and
cultural appreciation that our Greek guide explains whimsically:
. . . do not be surprised at the frequency with which you are
patted, petted and prodded in Greece. You may end up feeling like
the family dog . . . in an affectionate family. This propensity
to pat seems to us a tactile extension of the avid Greek
curiosity noted before. It's as though your hosts are trying to
find out what you are made of.
The widely separate characters of the spoken and written words
are easy to study today when there is ever closer touch with
nonliterate societies. One native, the only literate member of
his group, told of acting as reader for the others when they
received letters. He said he felt impelled to put his fingers to
his ears while reading aloud, so as not to violate the privacy of
their letters. This is interesting testimony to the values of
privacy fostered by the visual stress of phonetic writing. Such
separation of the senses, and of the individual from the group,
can scarcely occur without the influence of phonetic writing. The
spoken word does not afford the extension and amplification of
the visual power needed for habits of individualism and privacy.
It helps to appreciate the nature of the spoken word to contrast
it with the written form. Although phonetic writing separates and
extends the visual power of words, it is comparatively crude and
slow. There are not many ways of writing "tonight," but
Stanislavsky used to ask his young actors to pronounce and stress
it fifty different ways while the audience wrote down the
different shades of feeling and meaning expressed. Many a page of
prose and many a narrative has been devoted to expressing what
was, in effect, a sob, a moan, a laugh, or a piercing scream. The
written word spells out in sequence what is quick and implicit in
the spoken word.
Again, in speech we tend to react to each situation that occurs,
reacting in tone and gesture even to our own act of speaking. But
writing tends to be a kind of separate or specialist action in
which there is little opportunity or call for reaction. The
literate man or society develops the tremendous power of acting
in any matter with considerable detachment from the feelings or
emotional involvement that a nonliterate man or society would
experience.
Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, lived and wrote in a
tradition of thought in which it was and is considered that
language is a human technology that has impaired and diminished
the values of the collective unconscious. It is the extension of
man in speech that enables the intellect to detach itself from
the vastly wider reality. Without language, Bergson suggests,
human intelligence would have remained totally involved in the
objects of its attention. Language does for intelligence what the
wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move
from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less
involvement. Language extends and amplifies man butit also
divides his faculties. His collective consciousness or intuitive
awareness is diminished by this technical extensions of
consciousness that is speech.
Bergson argues in Creative Evolution that even consciousness is
an extension of man that dims the bliss of union in the
collective unconscious. Speech acts to separate man from man, and
mankind from the cosmic unconscious. As an extension or uttering
(outering) of all our senses at once, language has always been
held to be man's richest art form, that which distinguishes him
from the animal creation.
If the human ear can be compared to a radio receiver that is able
to decode electromagnetic waves and recode them as sound, the
human voice may be compared to the radio transmitter in being
able to translate sound into electromagnetic waves. The power of
the voice to shape air and space into verbal patterns may well
have been preceded by a less specialized expression of cries,
grunts, gestures, and commands, of song and dance. The patterns
of the senses that are extended in the various languages of men
are as varied as styles of dress and art. Each mother tongue
teaches its users a way of seeing and feeling the world, and of
acting in the world, that is quite unique.
Our new electric technology that extends our senses and nerves in
a global embrace has large implications for the future of
language. Electric technology does not need words any more than
the digital computer needs numbers. Electricity points the way to
an extension of the process of consciousness itself, on a world
scale, and without any verbalization whatever. Such a state of
collective awareness may have been the preverbal condition of
men. Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers
of division and separation we know so well, may have been the
"Tower of Babel" by which men sought to scale the
highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means
of instant translation of any code or language into any other
code or language. The computer, in short, promises by technology
a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity. The
next logical step would seem to be, not to translate, but to
bypass languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness which
might be very like the collective unconscious dreamt of by
Bergson. The condition of "weightlessness," that
biologists say promises a physical immortality, may be paralleled
by the condition of speechlessness that could confer a perpetuity
of collective harmony and peace.
from Understanding Media - (c) 1967 Marshall McLuhan