Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round they all laughed when Edison recorded sound they all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly they told Marconi wireless was a phony it's the same old cry.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: Welcome back to 100 Years of Television, where for 100 weeks that started in October 2025, we're going to recall the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television and video.
The countdown will culminate on September 7, 2027. That's the 100th anniversary of the day television was invented.
I'm Paul Schatzkin, author of the Boy who Invented Television, the definitive biography of Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented the world's first all electronic television system.
In the last episode, the Beatles made their historic appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in February 1964.
And today is countdown number 49. The past went thataway.
By the time the Beatles walked off the stage of the Ed Sullivan show, it was clear to anybody with eyes and ears that that in ways both seen and unseen, television had transformed the world.
But there was no way that television could explain itself to that world.
That was going to take something a little more old fashioned, like a book.
Sometime in 1964, McGraw Hill published Understanding the Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan, a relatively obscure English professor at the University of Toronto in Canada.
Marshall McLuhan did not set out to become the prophet of the global village. He studied English at the University of Manitoba, then crossed the pond at Trinity hall, Cambridge, in 1934.
There he fell in with I.A. richards and F.R. leavis, the founders of practical criticism, a discipline built on a deceptively simple question.
What if how something is communicated matters more than what is said?
McLuhan brought those questions home. After a few years teaching in the United States, McLuhan landed at the University of Toronto in 1946.
He stayed there for the rest of his career, turning the same close reading instincts Richard and Levis had trained on poetry onto advertising, comic books, radio, and eventually television.
Not as entertainment, but as forces rewiring how people think.
To his academic colleagues, this was an odd pursuit. Popular culture was not yet considered worthy of scholarly attention.
But McLuhan was beginning to regard mass media as something more than information or entertainment.
He began to think of mass media as subliminal environments that rewired how people think, how they perceive time and space, and how societies organize themselves.
By the early 1960s, television antennas were among the most common features on the global horizon. Living Rooms filled with flickering screens.
Families gathered nightly around the same shared experience as their neighbors. Political campaigns, news, entertainment and advertising were flowing through a common electronic pipeline.
So as the eyes of the world were glued to screens, McLuhan could see that something both invisible and profound was happening. Television was not just another medium, like books or newspapers or even radio. Television was reshaping human consciousness.
Prior to publishing understanding media, Marshall McLuhan had already begun mapping the cultural effects of modern communication in the Mechanical Bride in 1951, his witty dissection of advertising in popular culture, and the Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962, his award winning exploration of how print technology reshaped human thought and society.
But Understanding Media was the magnum opus that added the name of Marshall McLuhan to the cultural zeitgeist of the 20th century.
McLuhan's unique insight took him beyond content to exploring the effect of countless technologies that he regarded regarded as extensions of the human organism.
Print, radio, television, film, the telephone, even clothing, roads and money, he argued, extended human senses in different ways.
The wheel, McLuhan said, is an extension of the foot.
The book is an extension of the eye, and clothing an extension of the skin.
But television, McLuhan asserted, was the culmination of everything that had preceded it, an extension of the entire central nervous system.
McLuhan's central thesis was stated in an aphorism that is oft repeated, though little understood, the medium is the message.
By this, McLuhan meant societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which they communicate than than by the content of the communication.
McLuhan made that statement more clearly in the Medium Is the Massage, a uniquely illustrated sequel to understanding media that McLuhan created with graphic designer Quentin Fiore for publication in 1967. McLuhan did not mean that content was irrelevant or didn't have any impact or value.
Instead, McLuhan argued for a higher altitude perspective into the changes that the media themselves caused in human behavior.
Television, McLuhan said, mattered not because of what it broadcast, but because it transformed the environment into something new, immersive and participatory.
McLuhan deftly described how print, first introduced in the 15th century and dominant until the 20th century, fostered private, linear thinking, individualism, and even nationalism.
But information that traveled slowly by ship, rail or print now moved at the speed of light.
Electronic media had collapsed the distances that had once separated people and cultures, effectively retribalizing humanity but on a global scale.
Indeed, even more so than the medium is the message. The expression most indelibly associated with Marshall McClell, McLuhan is the global village.
Television, McLuhan observed, created a shared, simultaneous experience, as we have seen in previous milestones here, like the Kennedy assassination in November 1963 and the Beatles appearances on Ed Sullivan in February 1964.
By the mid-1960s, tens of millions of people were watching the same images, simultaneously experiencing events around in real time.
The result, McLuhan said, was not a larger, more anonymous world, but something paradoxically smaller and more intimate, a planet wrapped in a vibrating web of electric circuitry that mimicked the oral traditions of preliterate tribal societies.
The whole world was wiring itself into a single village where everyone could suddenly see, hear and respond to everyone else.
These ideas were as new and exhilarating as McLuhan's prose was at times obtuse and baffling.
McLuhan wrote in Aphorisms, paradoxes and elliptical observations, perhaps deliberately invoking the premise of a world rewired. He rarely built arguments in a traditional linear or academic fashion.
Instead, he leapt from one metaphor to another, leaving readers to connect the dots.
Critics complained that McLuhan was obscure, even deliberately confusing.
Academics accused him of being unserious, and journalists sometimes treated him as more of a mystic than a scholar.
But his ideas were tantalizing, even irresistible, at a time when the world was rapidly changing.
The release of the Medium is The massage in 1967 brought McLuhan to an even larger audience audience with its novel, visually dynamic, image driven format.
Taking its title from a play on his oft quoted aphorism, the Medium is the Massage became a best seller and cemented McLuhan's place in popular culture.
In the Medium is the massage, McLuhan added another dimension to his central thesis, the idea that cultures always drive into the future through filters created in the past.
The past went that a way, McLuhan wrote, when faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects and to the flavor of the most recent past.
We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
In the 1970s, critics tried to dismiss McLuhan, arguing that his ideas were too broad or lacked empirical rigorous.
As academic trends shifted, McLuhan's reputation faded. But that didn't stop Woody Allen from featuring him in a cameo appearance in the Oscar winning 1977 film Annie Hall.
When Understanding Media was first published in 1964, television was still young.
Cable TV had barely begun its incursion into urban areas, satellites were still experimental, and the Internet was simply unimaginable but the themes McLuhan introduced found vivid echoes in the decades that followed.
In 1985, Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death, arguing that television had transformed all public discourse, from politics to religion to journalism into a form of entertainment.
Drawing explicitly on McLuhan, Postman warned that our culture was not controlled by force, as envisioned in George Orwell's 1984, but by pleasure, amusement, and distraction, as described in Aldous Huxley's dystopian Brave New World.
A generation later, Nicholas Carr updated the alarm for the Internet age with the Shallows in 2010, arguing, as McLuhan had that the medium was literally rewiring our brains.
The Net's interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others, carr wrote.
It also turns us into lab rats, constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.
Carr acknowledged his predecessor, noting that what both enthusiasts and skeptics miss is what McLuhan clearly saw that in the long run, a medium's content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act.
And as recently as 2017, Kurt Anderson's Fantasyland How America Went Haywire drew heavily on McLuhan's theses to explain the election of Donald Trump the previous year.
In McLuhan's day, the cultural, political and economic landscapes were dominated by mass media.
On television, it was mostly three networks and three to five stations. In any given market, there were a very limited number of points of transmission and an infinite number of points of reception.
But with computers, smartphones and the World Wide Web all using displays that started as modified televisions, that ratio has reached parity. Every point of reception is a potential source of transmission, and everyone who wants to can have their own channel.
And while that 21st century transformation has seemingly atomized the global village, the filters that McLuhan devised for understanding the tectonic shifts in the media landscape remain as relevant as ever.
The content has become infinitely more diversified, but the medium is still the message.
Thus ends 49 in the countdown of the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television.
Stay tuned for the next episode when football on television begins to challenge baseball as America's national pastime.
Thanks for listening to 100 Years of Television, a two year countdown to the centennial of television on September 7, 2027.
For more, aim your gizmo to 100yearstv.com this podcast was written, recorded, edited, engineered and uploaded by me, Paul Schatzkin, and is a production of Farnovision.
If television was invented by somebody named Farnsworth, why don't we call it Farnovision?
[00:14:32] Speaker A: They all said we never would be happy they laughed at us and how.
But ho, ho, ho, who got the laughs out now?
