The Hardware Store

Prophet Marshall McLuhan has just invaded what he calls the "hot" medium of printed journalism. As he sees it, people are so absorbed with old-fashioned words that they don't even notice the tidal wave of change about to engulf them. To help them "survive," he says, he is putting out a monthly newsletter called The McLuhan Dew-Line. It is intended to "raise a mighty scream" to warn readers of the imminent electronics takeover.

Actually, the two issues that have appeared so far do not raise more than a moderate yelp. It has all been said before in McLuhan's earlier books. Once again, the McLuhan message is that the new "software" environment--radio, TV, phones, computers--has replaced the old "hardware" environment of books and rules and roads and railways. In the process, people have become "tribalized" and thrust together into new worldwide intimacy. This intimacy is fraught with violence because people are unused to it.

In his August newsletter, McLuhan allots only a sentence or two to a page and calls them "instant posters." Thus the 34 pages consist mostly of white space. The purpose of this, states the preface, is to keep the words from "bumping into, and obscuring each other. To monumentalize them--make them stand out in three-dimensional relief--allow them to be felt, touched, tasted, chewed over."

Most of the thoughts can be masticated pretty quickly. Sample: "In a world of very rapid technological change, the sense of identity is not only threatened but shattered over and over again." There are one or two rather provocative notions. The murder of Bobby Kennedy, postulates McLuhan, resulted from a breakdown between the new and old world of communication. In suggesting arms for Israel, Kennedy "spoke from a spacious and underpopulated world of highly fragmented, individualist culture--but he was also speaking straight into the ear of a highly tribalized corporate culture."

For such insights, a subscriber pays $50 a year; so far, 1,000 have signed up. They may find that the message of Dew-Line does not vary much from issue to issue, though the format does. The first issue, for example, was more of a traditional newsletter, with four pages of closely spaced type celebrating the arrival of the software age. Other surprises are in store, including phonograph records. Still, for a man who considers printed words obsolete, McLuhan seems to be addicted to them.

But most people, McLuhan concedes, continue to use the old hardware. "So I use the old hardware too."

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