After watching the Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford presidential debates in October 1976, Marshall McLuhan made the comment, "Both radio and television present many nonverbal factors that result in the radio listener's getting a completely different debate from the television viewer. Quite apart from the particular media, the hidden ground of American politics is now (in 1976) a simultaneous information environment that extends to the entire planet.
"This situation is structured and patterned for role-playing rather than for goals or policies. In effect, this means that both political parties and policies have little relevance in a world that expects a total-service environment. The charismatic image has replaced the goals and the parties and the policies.
The main characteristic of an information environment is the proliferation of attractive images and promises. It is a world of public relations and prestige.
"It is a world of entertainment and promises, characteristic of the folklore of the advertising world. Ford and Carter are both, in their different ways, adequate television images. Carter has an advantage, not only of a Kennedy-like euphoria and bounce; there is the hidden factor of his corporate or Southern group voice and sociability that is not shared by Ford or by the North. The corporate character of Southern oral tradition is manifest in its monopoly of jazz and rock and folk religion.
"Speaking in terms of the twin hemispheres of the brain, the South represents the right hemisphere – oral, musical, intuitive and social. The North, on the other hand, is strongly allied to the left hemisphere of the brain – lineal, connected, literate and goal-oriented.
The electric information environment strongly fosters the dominance of the right hemisphere over the left. It is this new dominance of the right hemisphere that created the generation gap and the world of activist involvement in role-playing.
"The electronic ground or environment of simultaneous information strongly favors the right hemisphere of the brain and the public – it is a qualitative area of the brain – whereas the left hemisphere is quantitative and specialist. Young America and the television generation have a very heavy bias toward the right hemisphere, whereas Gerald Ford is centered in the left hemisphere of bureaucracy and quantitative industrial performance.
"The debates, therefore, will align the old pre-TV generation against the young of the TV world.
Another feature of the hidden electronic ground that will affect the debates is the total decentralism of responsibility that requires the First World to be the keeper of the Third World. Young America in its art and entertainment now (in 1976) has an empathy with the Third World far exceeding its concern or devotion with the educational and economic establishment of the First World and the left hemisphere. At this point the domestic and the international scene merge and the meaning of 'foreign policy' is reversed."
Back in July 1972, Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt, the co-authors of 'Take Today: The Executive as Dropout' explained the return of the hunter and his subsequent take over, "At the present time (in 1972) the new hidden environment is the ring of satellites when began to form in 1957 with Sputnik. The effect of putting the age-old planet inside a man-made environment is to create 'space-capsule Earth.'
"The planet becomes an old nose cone, a garbage dump, a resource center, an archeological museum, a midden heap of trash and treasures. Typically, on September 11, 1969, in the wilderness of Alaska a bevy of tycoons rallied to hold a little auction. The very ancient and decayed animal matter that was the occasion of their little rally elicited bids of almost $1 billion in total and included a bid of $73 million for one parcel of property.
"The bidding was in anticipation of services and resources, any of which might be eliminated by technological innovation in the immediate future; for oil, as fuel or as raw material, might be supplanted by new materials and technologies.
Hints of this fate are now (in 1972) indicated by the mounting level of disservices provided by this old service environment. The services rendered to ecology by the dinosaur suddenly ended when the dinosaur achieved vast bulk.
"As the dinosaur became an enviroment, he ceased to accommodate to the existing world. He became pollution and ended. Today (in 1972) the truck and the motor car have long passed the point where their services exceed their disservices in the Western world. It is not so much their noise or stench as their all-pervasiveness that has condemned them.
"By their flexible power to insert themselves into every corner of the global environment, these vehicles have destroyed neighborhood and community universally. The total alienation of men from their fellows, which results from the destruction of neighborhood, automatically condemns to liquidation the technology that creates such a disservice.
The overriding hidden environment of satellites ends the regime of nature forever so far as man is concerned.
"The Earth itself has become a programmed artifact. But a binary reduction of ecological process to two-bit computer wit will not serve to program human environments. It will only serve to achieve specialist goals. A new total field theory of equilibrium and change is now mandatory. It is not a hypothetical need, but the necessity for total awareness of effects with causes before undertaking any major innovation whatever.
"For example, in human terms, the effect of the satellite ring is to serve as the proscenium arch that transforms our globe into a theater. People instinctively move toward costumed role-playing as they step out onto the global stage under the proscenium arch of satellites. If the satellite ring scrapped the planet as the old world of nature, it even more decidedly climinated the image of the job-holder or the specialist skills of an old 'hardware' society.
"People, individually and collectively, are now totally alienated from their earlier image of themselves. This has happened within a decade. In the Renaissance, it required a century and more to achieve anything comparable in the alteration of the human psychic and social organization. Today (in 1972), it is not the loosening of social bonds such as in the Renaissance, but the sudden tightening of social bonds that confronts management in every area of human organization.
"Humpty Dumpty has gone together again with a rush and without the bureaucratic aid of the King’s horses and the king’s men. The hunter returns and takes over.
With high-rise you have Necropolis – ideally a cemetery in the sky – the only answer to which is to put the old housing into costume. For the old-fashioned executive or manager the new costume for anticipating psychic and social effects is dialogue.
"Dialogue among a diversity of age groups and skills can take the form of simply an inventory of problems in each of several varied roles. Whether the person is 3 years old or 30, whether he is a lawyer or a mortician, a housewife or a teacher a full and frank disclosure of hangups will reveal common pattern. The 3-year-old child lives in a nuclear family, not a neighborhood or a kinship group. He feels isolated.
"The 30-year-old bureaucrat cannot gain access to the adjacent classified information guarded by his colleagues. The ground rules prevent him from engaging in teamwork. The lawyer is obliged to administer a code which has no relevance to either its victors or victims. He experiences total irrelevance, for the 'victor belongs to the spoils!'
"The mortician, in a world of cremation on the one hand or of high-rise cemeteries on the other hand, is compelled to offer his clients the very insecure prospect of meeting their Creator half-way. He might as well install telephones as funeral wreaths on coffins in the sky. The high-rise cemeteries (necessary in order to make the fruitful Earth available for the living) is a service environment in the sense that it highlights the disservice environment of high-rise apartments for human living.
"High-rise, in its first manifestations, merely created a necropolis of non-neighborhoods for nonpeople. A planning genius was needed to anticipate the dehumanizing effects of high-rise and to translate them into their true language of the mortuary. But the pattern revealed by dialogue among diverse individuals is that of the non-functionary and nonspecialist who reveal 'where it's at.'"
Lillian Smith believed the 1966 book 'The Hidden Dimension' by anthropologist Edward T. Hall was a book for statesmen to read and for all people who traveled or worked with different groups (from rural and urban to foreign and domestic) or written about this world. "Each group of us, apparently, inhabits a different sensory world and peers out at the others through a different perceptive screen."
"We might as well face it: as we try to leave the set patterns and ideological thinking and planning of the 19th and early 20th centuries and launch ourselves and our regions and nations into the delicate, dangerous age of close human relations, we are going to need to understand the different screens through which we peer at each other and adjust our behavior not only to what we feel and think but to what 'the others' feel and think also, even though it is unconscious thinking and feeling."
In 'The Hidden Dimension', Edward Hall made the point, "The ethnic crisis, the urban crisis, and the education crisis are interrelated; all three are different facets of a larger crisis, a natural outgrowth of man’s having developed the cultural dimension – most of which is hidden from view." In 'The Hidden Dimension', Edward Hall explored man's perception of space – his own personal space - through the five senses.
As well, Edward Hall explored the uses man would make of space and his adjustments to it in architecture, art, psychology, and urban problems. "Man is the kind of creature he is because of the culture in which he was reared, based on his biological heritage. This is the departure point for Dr. Hall's intriguing small book," reviewer Ray Embree remarked.
"While we are all the product of our biological ancestry, from which we cannot separate ourselves, we are modified and molded by language and culture, with the result that men of different cultural backgrounds sometimes have great difficulty in understanding and communicating with others. Thus cultural difference exists not only between nations, but between regions and groups within the same nation.
"Dr. Hall shows that the gulf between man and the lower animals, biologically, is much narrower than many of us think. Studies of animal behavior have gone far toward explaining man’s own nature. The aspect which interests the author of 'Hidden Dimension' is man's perception of space, our own personal space – the spaces which our bodies occupy. Of particular interest to Hall is the result of overcrowding, especially in the slum of large cities.
"Observations and experiments with animals have shown what happens when there are too many individuals of species within a restricted area. Experiments with rats show that under extremely overcrowded conditions there is a breakdown of their social system into complete chaos, including constant fighting, molestation of the females, abandonment by the females of their nests, and even cannibalism of the young. Such a condition Hall calls a 'sink'. He warns, with good scientific backing, that sink conditions are developing rapidly in some of our cities."
"Observations and experiments with animals have shown what happens when there are too many individuals of species within a restricted area. Experiments with rats show that under extremely overcrowded conditions there is a breakdown of their social system into complete chaos, including constant fighting, molestation of the females, abandonment by the females of their nests, and even cannibalism of the young. Such a condition Hall calls a 'sink'. He warns, with good scientific backing, that sink conditions are developing rapidly in some of our cities."
