Marshall McLuhan 1974 - Full lecture Living in an Acoustic World | University of South Florida

Title: Living in an Acoustic World
Speaker: Marshall McLuhan
Location: University of South Florida, 1974

Description: One of the big flips that’s taking place in our time is the changeover from the eye to the ear. Most of us, having grown up in the visual world, are now suddenly confronted with the problems of living in an acoustic world which is, in effect, a world of simultaneous information.

The visual world has very peculiar properties, and the acoustic world has quite different properties. The visual world which belongs to the old nineteenth century, and which had been around for quite a while, say from the sixteenth century anyway, has the properties of being continuous and connected and homogeneous, all parts more or less alike. Things stayed put. If you had a point of view, that stayed put. The acoustic world, which is the electric world of simultaneity, has no continuity, no homogeneity, no connections, and no stasis. Everything is changing. To move from one of those worlds to the other is a very big shift. It’s the same shift that Alice in Wonderland made when she went through the looking glass. She moved out of the visual world and into the acoustic world when she went through the looking glass.

Now to explain a bit about the implications of this rather large shift: It concerns the whole problem of learning, teaching, social life, politics and entertainment, and I’m going to try to tie it into some of those places. First I will try to illustrate how we became visual in the first place.

There is only one part of the world that ever did go visual, and that is the Western Greco-Roman Hellenistic world. About 500 B.C. something happened which made it possible to flip out of the old acoustic world, which was the normal one of the tribal Greek society, the Homeric world. Something happened which flipped them out of the old world of the bards into this new, rational, philosophically logical, connected, private, individualistic, and civilized world. And that thing is called the phonetic alphabet. The origins of the phonetic alphabet are by no means clear. All we know is what it did to people. The phonetic alphabet has a very peculiar set of characteristics which are not shared by any other alphabet on this planet. The phonetic alphabet, the one we all call the ABCs, has a very peculiar structure. It is made up of phonemes—that is, bits that are meaningless. The twenty-six letters of our alphabet have no meaning at all. They’re called phonemes because in linguistic terms that word means the smallest possible meaningless bit. All the other alphabets in the world—the Hebrew, the Arabic, the Hindu, the Chinese and so on—are morphemic. The bits they are made of have meaning—some meaning, however small.

More information:

McLuhan online archive: https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/
McLuhan on Maui: http://www.mcluhanonmaui.com/
McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography by Richard Cavell Review by former PhD student Donald F. Theall: http://www.mcluhanonmaui.com/2011/07/thealls-take-on-cavells-mcluhan-in.html
About Donald Theall: http://www.trentu.ca/donaldtheall/
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