Gerald Jonas was one of science fiction’s early “crossover critics”; he wrote about the science fiction “scene” for the New Yorker on a few occasions and reviewed science fiction books for the New York Times.1 There are more of these types of writers operating throughout science fiction’s history than you might think, but, as Charli xcx once reminded us, nobody builds statues of critics. So.
However, I’m not here to talk about science fiction. I was going through his New Yorker pieces and ended up reading a Talk of the Town joint called “Knowledge Decentralized” (1968). It’s about a machine called “the Talking Page,” which was, as far as I can tell, a portable record player that came with workbooks. (At “fifteen and a half pounds,” I wondered how it stacks up to the actual portable record players of 1968—cursory web search says, pretty well, but it depends.) The gist of the article is that everybody involved with the Talking Page, but particularly Marshall McLuhan, thinks it’s going to change education forever.
I actually thought this piece was a joke. I thought, maybe Talk of the Town used to run satirical pieces. And really, I don’t know what other reaction is possible to passages like this one:
[Marshall McLuhan] praised the Talking Page as a piece of “hardware” that would contribute to “the decentralization of knowledge.” He went on to say, “Just as the portable radio on the camel revolutionized the Middle. East, this kind of portable device can revolutionize education. What’s going on at Columbia University at present is a revolt against centralism. Under electric conditions, every type of knowledge is decentralized. We live in a programmed environment where the levels of information are fantastically higher—in TV and magazine ads, for instance—than anything offered in a university. By the age of six, a child resents being called a child, because he knows as much about his environment, probably, as he’ll ever know.” Dr. McLuhan said he found it especially significant that the Columbia undergraduates had despoiled the filing cabinets in the office of President Grayson Kirk, because the filing cabinet is the perfect symbol of “the obsolete, centralized university.” He expressed a hope that the “software” connected with the Talking Page—that is, the teaching programs themselves—would reflect the world around us. “We should be training perception, not just cramming in information,” he explained. “Today’s students don’t want information; they are looking for images, for a meaningful identity.” Devices like the Talking Page, he said, are “absolutely in the groove of an electric time.”
It has to be a joke, right? Bzzt, wrong. This machine was completely real (you can see a picture here) and McLuhan really was involved; there’s a New York Times article about the Talking Page that mentions him. Thus, I am forced to believe these are all things he really said, including his statement toward the end of the article that Mickey Mouse represents an avant-garde art form. Incidentally, between the quote above and the Harlan Ellison quote in footnote one, I am realizing that “groovy,” the slang term, was probably tied to records, as they have grooves. And yet, despite the vinyl revival, nobody is grooving. A shame.
On Newspapers.com, searching for “the talking page” turns up some instances of the device being tried out in schools. Here’s some items from San Antonio, Texas; Billings, Montana; Tucson, Arizona; Portland, Maine; and Beaver Dam, Wisconsin:
There’s not much follow up I can find on how these systems worked out for these school districts or if they worked at all. (A certain lack of a five-years-later-follow-up is no doubt a constant irritation among historians of educational fads.) The Responsive Environments Corporation also created a program that leased (unresponsive, paper) books to schools, which doesn’t really sound like a great deal to me (but I have never run a school budget). I stop getting results for either the Responsive Environments Corporation or the Responsive Environments Leasing Corporation after 1994. (That is about the level of research I conducted for this newsletter.)
I don’t think these devices are ridiculous. It is obvious how the Talking Page or its counterpart, the Talking Typewriter, would be useful devices for disabled children. But I would imagine that just as there’s not really enough money in making devices for disabled children, which is why it has to be branded as not only for all children (maybe it is) but something that will end education as we know it. Or, for McLuhan, end university education as we know it, even if this device is not even being marketed toward use in higher education.
The university has been dying as long as I’ve been alive, but then in a sense I have been too. I don’t see anything wrong with experimenting with it, either—or with grade school education—but I do long for a certain amount of humility from people who hype up technological solutions to learning. People who want to proclaim this or that piece of hardware or software will change everything about how we learn can’t go dining out on the printing press forever. They would earn some grace with me (which I’m sure is very important to them) if they acknowledged the number of dead ends and expensive transitional technologies that have been sold as the future.
As for decentralization, I have a fondness for it myself, but sources of knowledge have only become more and more centralized, along with the institutions that produce such sources. (Putting aside things like “publishing,” I am old enough to remember when going online meant floating among various forums and websites run by people devoted to individual topics. That isn’t what it means anymore.) So I guess that’s the other lesson: technology is, as we’re always being reminded, just a way of producing tools that can be used in any way that we desire. Sometimes we desire to make things worse.
Actually, I find in his piece “S.F.” (1972), exactly what I was trying to find for my joking piece about Golden Age strawmen (relevant sections bolded):
Up until a few years ago, otherwise normal human beings who happened to enjoy reading science fiction tended to be somewhat secretive about their reading habits. They were well aware that most people thought of science fiction as a subliterary genre of adolescent escapism that flourished in magazines with names like Amazing Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, and Astounding Science Fiction—magazines printed in blotchy ink on brittle pulp paper and wrapped in garishly colored covers showing a nubile girl astronaut about to be engulfed by an octopodan creature from outer space with a strange gleam in each of its multifaceted eyes. There was no use trying to explain that scenes of intergalactic rape had long ago vanished from the covers of the better S.F. magazines, or that even in the darkest days of the pulp era there had been more to science fiction than adolescent escapism. Stereotypes die hard, though, and science fiction was one of those subjects—like life after death, or sexual perversion—that everyone felt qualified to have an opinion on despite a lack of first-hand experience.
Allow me also to mention this paragraph on Harlan Ellison from “Evolution and Ideation” (1968):
Harlan Ellison, the chief prophet of the New Wave, puts the emphasis elsewhere. “What I want to see is total freedom—the freedom to entertain philosophical premises that are emotionally disturbing,” he told us. “But the fans don’t want to read about real sex, real drugs, or really shocking ideas about society.” Mr. Ellison is a non-stop con-troversialist who comes on like an angry Woody Allen. He is thirty-three, lives in Los Angeles, smokes a pipe, and writes for television and the movies. “This is a very peculiar field,” he said. “It’s inhabited by people who like to think they’re living in the future but who dress out of the nineteen-forties, never read anything new, and listen to music that’s hopelessly out of date. Let’s face it, for years the fans kept the field together, but today they’re just holding it back.” Ellison, who was wearing a dark-blue sports jacket over a light-blue turtleneck jersey, gestured forcefully with his pipe. “The big literary influences on the new writers in the field are mainstream people like Burroughs, Nabokov, and Barthelme. But even more important are things like rock—everybody’s grooving to the wild new sounds, to the imagery of rock lyrics, the fractured thinking, the poetry. Things like that get to people on an emotional level, not a cerebral level, and that’s where we have to be. When science fiction was a bold new medium, in the forties, it was strong on imagination. Now, if we can take the experimental techniques of the mainstream and put them together with our imagination. . .” Ellison’s eyes lit up with his vision of a truly groovy future.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the (as it turns out, dubious) 60s/70s theory that black children in particular, and poor students in general, were having trouble with literacy because they literally weren’t hearing enough words