Essential McLuhan 218 The “Beatles” stare at us with eloquent messages of changed sensory modes for our whole population, and yet people merely think how whimsical, how bizarre, how grotesque. The Beatles are trying to tell us by the antienvironment they present just how we have changed and in what ways. To repeat, and to make toward a conclusion, the effect of any new environment—every new technology creates a new environment just as the motor car does, as the railway did, or as radio and airplanes do—any new technology changes the whole human environment, and envelops and includes the old environments. It turns these old environments into “art forms”—old Model T’s become precious art objects, as do old coach lamps, old anything. The world of Camp, for example, is the world of the nursery of thirty years ago being turned into a conscious art form. By simply taking into the shopwindow old toys, old ornaments, and the things Mom used to wear thirty years ago, you turn them into art forms and you have C-A-M-P, this mysterious new archetype. The new environment is always creating new archetypes, new art forms, out of the old environment. This process can provide invaluable information for those who want to have some autonomy in controlling their destinies and their environments. I think we are rapidly moving toward a time when we might say, with full awareness of causes and effects: “In our present sensory condition, I don’t think we could properly accommodate two hundred more lines on TV.” Color TV will considerably change the whole sensory life of the public. It is a much more tactual form than black and white. But what would happen to the North American world if we did as the French and Germans have done; if instead of four hundred and fifty lines on our television, we were to put eight hundred? The results might be most gratifying to the educational establishment. If we raised the visual intensity or the visual component of the TV image, it might serve enormously to ease the transition from the old mechanical age to the electronic age. What would be the chances of getting an experimental study of such a change in our time? I don’t know. Lindegren would say the chances were not good. Anything that is serious is out of bounds. I think it was David Riesman who said no social scientist would ever study anything important. To be scientific you must study the fragmental, the insignificant. How else can you give assurance of your precision and concentration? Perhaps this attitude explains why, in our world, we tend to substitute moral indignation for observation. Moral vehemence is proof positive of superior perception. For example, we now experience simultaneously the dropout and the teach-in. The two forms are correlative. They belong together. The teach-in represents an attempt to shift education from instruction to discovery, from brainwashing students to brainwashing instructors. It is a big dramatic reversal. Vietnam, as the content of the teach-in, is a very small, misleading Red Herring. It really has nothing to do with the teach-in as such anymore than with the