-. Seitz: Our next formal discussant is Dr. John E. eynolds, who is advisor to the Division of Intertional Finance for the Board of Governors of the deral Reserve System in Washington, D. C.

r. Reynolds: I think it is important that we give e audience a chance; therefore, I will try to be ry brief indeed. Perhaps the most useful thing I an do is to note the one or two of the points at hich it seems to me the different remarks we have card this morning bear upon each other.

Seeing Things as a Whole

One of Professor McLuhan's themes is that the ew technology, the electronic or the information chnology, enables us to see things whole; indeed, it ompels us to see things whole. We have to take fuge from information overload in something he alls pattern recognition.

I think throughout all the major speeches of this orning has run the thread of "having to see things hole" in analyzing the role of technology in world ade. I see this in at least three different aspects.

Learning to Use Technology

First, that we have to have a sense of history; that e have to see a time continuum, and recognize that e past is linked with the present and that with the iture. Both Secretary Connor and Dr. Seitz remind1 us that man has had technology as long as we ave any record of his existence. Technology and ade have been the essence, really, of our whole se from the cave up to our present state of life.

And while, as Professor Cooper says, economists ill differ on whether it has contributed one-fifth or ree-fifths of our progress-depending on how they low for education-still that's where economic rowth comes from-technology. While we perhaps an't measure it quantitatively, we know that it is so nd we recognize the success in the adaptation to nd the exploitation of technology to meet human eeds.

I think we haven't made a quantum jump into a brand new kind of world with our new technology, but we have a long experience of making use of technology. Our pace may be faster now than before, so that we have to learn to adapt ourselves faster than before or run greater risks of not adapting, but we can still learn from the past. Economists who plot growth rates find that they are faster now than they were but it is four percent per year instead of three, or perhaps four-and-a-half percent instead of three, rather than some brand new order of rate of change that we are experiencing.

The Characteristics of Trade and Investment

A second way in which it seems to me we need to see things whole-and this, too, was stressed by several of the speakers-is that international trade and investment are really only aspects of or extensions of trade and investment as a whole. Economists may be partly to blame for having made the study of international trade such a very special thing as if an export were quite a different thing from ordinary shipments say from Buffalo, New York, to Atlanta, Georgia. They are very similar things, and while national boundaries are there and matter-matter very much to lawyers, matter very much, too, for certain tax purposes and so on-still the essence of the way in which technology contributes to the quality of life is quite general and can't be viewed as different in its international trade and investment aspects than in domestic trade and investment aspects.

Viewing Economics Globally

Finally, I think Mr. McLuhan has impressed upon us that the world has become really a globalsized village and we can't so readily take partial and private viewpoints of the needs of the world. We have to think, really, of the thing as a whole, now. We are doing that more and more, and one reason we have moved ahead rather successfully in an economic and technologic way during the two decades since World War II is that we have been taking an over-all view. It is true in the field in which I work, international economic policy; and, incidentally, I think that the extent to which we profit by technological advance is importantly conditioned by whether we follow sensible or foolish economic policies.

People talk of competitiveness, but you can't talk of that in technological terms alone; it has to do with prices and exchange rates as well as with physical characteristics of processes. The OECD has been

ɔned. It is very encouraging that people go rly from all over the developed world to meetn Paris of the OECD to consider together how nay jointly improve their policies towards the >pment of technology and also their economic es which bear on the rate at which technology e usefully applied. The very days of this Symm are also days for another round of meetings le OECD Science Policy and Economic Policy nittees.

ofessor Cooper mentioned two reasons for the rapid expansion of world trade in recent years, among several. One, that trade barriers have lowered, and, two that the pace of techgical innovation has been rapid. These two int very much. We have had to lower the trade ers in order to take advantage of the technology conversely, by lowering the trade barriers, we broadened the scope of beneficiaries from techgy. I agree with the Secretary, most heartily, the main task for all of us is to keep things free remove obstacles, as much as possible.

Can We Learn to Transfer Technology Across the Equator?

There is a tendency to focus on the problems of flow of information and technological gaps mainly across the Atlantic, whereas in my view, the problems are much less serious across the Atlantic than they are across the Equator. I hope at some point during this meeting that people will take a good hard look at the problem of how you transmit technology from highly developed countries to less developed countries. The challenge is that this needs to be done with none of the long experience we have had and needed in building up stable governments with some support from scholastic research experience. Looking back from fifty years from now, the real test of our times will have been not whether we have got along well across the Atlantic, but whether we were able to transmit to the much poorer countries of the Southern Hemisphere the means of making progress.

ESTIONS FROM THE FLOOR

Seitz: The session is now open for questions or iments. Does anyone wish to start?

Melville Green (NBS): I was much stimulated Professor McLuhan's talk. He has ways of debing patterns by which we can try to understand current civilization and the one that is rapidly ring down on us.

However, some of his patterns seem to be someat contradictory and I wanted to ask him to clarIn particular, he was discussing our young peoand he said that they are learning by discovering her than by sitting in a classroom and being ght.

The image is of a more active pursuit of knowlge. This was reinforced by his image of the nter. However, toward the end of his talk he menned that we all seem to be turning into television eens and becoming more oriental and perhaps >re passive.

I would like him to comment on what seems to è a contradiction, or perhaps one shouldn't at this

stage of the game look for consistency but rather as in modern physics, find complementarity.

Professor McLuhan: Yes, I wished to indicate that the coming pattern in education is moving away from instruction toward discovery, just as in business and other organizations generally, people want more involvement. It doesn't matter what the age group or the operation is. In the same way, children today, in their new electric environment, have come to expect much more involvement in the decisionmaking and in the learning process.

I don't say we have done anything about this. I didn't wish to indicate that anything has been done about this. Nothing has been done. But the children are sitting there waiting to be involved in the process of discovery by being sent out into the society in small teams to do research, to discover and thereby learn.

Professor Oppenheimer used to say, "There are kids playing here on the sidewalk that can solve some of my toughest problems in physics because

256-707 O-67-3

they have modes of perception that I lost forty years ago." The idea that you can use children in high level research is not something we are doing anything about. No. It is just a coming possibility, that's all.

The other matter of TV screens refers, not to passivity, but to the exact opposite. TV is a profoundly involving medium because it takes us inside ourselves actively and inquisitively on a kind of a trip, as it were. LSD and TV are closely related. LSD is merely a physiological analogue to TV, and the craze for LSD is nourished by the TV screen. The TV screen is not the movie screen, it has nothing to do with the old movie camera technique. You see, the movie camera extends the eye and takes you out into the environment. TV does the exact opposite. It takes you inside yourself.

Existentialism, which came along with electric circuitry, began with this interior trip into the darkness of our own being. Kierkegaard and Sartre and such people are all part of the western movement inwards, for the investigation of the new frontier. Paradoxically, the new interior trip is unique and singular, is not mass produced; people go on talking about mass production and mass education without noticing that they each now have the exactly opposite character. For the young people in our world today, movement is toward the unique and the singular and away from the mass produced and the general.

So the points that were raised by your question are typical of just how difficult it is to discuss the matters that are part of our current environment. It is much easier to discuss the old rear view mirror image than it is to tackle what is right under your nose. It is very difficult to discuss the present. I have a friend who says the future of the future is the present. True, but the difficulty is to see the present. Very difficult.

Dr. Seitz: Another question?

Professor Rao: We have heard, at this meeting and others, discussion of the effects of science and technology on international dealing and investments. I would like to suggest that the effect of technology in the last twenty years has hardly been sensed in the developing countries as far as their international trade or even their national income is concerned.

What has been the effect of technology and science on the exports of developing countries? How far has it reduced their external dependence? How

far has it reduced the gap between their nation income and that of other nations? Japan has had remarkable experience, but other nations have not think it would be very good if some research were th be done on that subject and I hope that this symp sium and others to follow will deal with that. Should we not deal also with the more effective utilizatio of the resources already available in developing countries rather than weakening those needs and de mands by displacing those resources by synthetics and technological substitutes, for example?

Dr. Seitz: The question, as I think all of you heard is about what the effect of the technological develop ments, since World War II, upon the developing countries, treating Japan as somewhat of an excep tion. To what extent have these countries bee helped or hindered? Moreover, to what extent ha the development of such things as synthetic textile had a deleterious effect in the natural fiber industrie of the developing countries?

I wonder if one of the panelists would care speak to this. Professor Cooper?

Professor Cooper: I agree very much with Dr. Ra that we need careful study of this question. I woul not, as a preliminary hypothesis, start out with the view that the impact of science and technology has been nil or close to nil.

It is true that the great growth in trade in pro ucts having a high technological content has pre dominantly been among industrial countries, leaving aside, as he did, the export of capital goods to the less developed countries.

Most of this vast growth of trade has taken plac among the industrial countries and the less deve oped countries have been in a kind of a backwate Still, one can point to numerous examples where ac vances in technology have contributed to the foreig exchange earnings, the additional receipts, of less de veloped countries. Things come to mind like the greatly improved strains of rubber which are no being produced and exported from Malaya, the de velopment of new and lower grade sources of metallic ores which due to improvements in the concer tration process and reduction in the cost of bul transport permit earnings from what only a few years ago was regarded as worthless dirt. Develop ments in transportation, refrigeration, have stimulat ed the whole banana industry.

What is striking about the examples that I have given is that they all focus on primary products and

not on manufactured products. What has happened is that the growth in exports by the less developed countries has been in products with quite a low technological content. It would be useful to have much more detailed scrutiny of why it is that these tremendous improvements in available technology have been left relatively to one side in the less developed countries and have not affected their manufacturing operations much.

Dr. Seitz: Any other comments? A question over here.

Mr. Charles Vetter (United States Information Agency): As prompted by Mr. Reynolds' discussion, I'd like to hear a comment on barriers to the movement of knowledge across the Equator. Are these barriers attitudinal, motivational, conceptual?

We see the same barriers domestically in the urban problems that we have. There seems also to be a parallel between the problems between cultures within our own country, like Appalachia or the urban slum area, and the problems of international movement of trade and technology.

I would like very much to hear Mr. McLuhan's comments on means for influencing the attitudes that are the barriers and perhaps on how technology can be more effective in our training systems for people who are promoting the movements of ideas.

Dr. McLuhan: Well, sir, that's a big order. It has been the traditional function of the arts to train our perception. The artist is the only person who can look at the present, at new environments without fear, and can report what he sees by new patterns and new styles.

The artist has training in perception rather than a blood bank or store of values. Pop art today, for example, is attempting to tell us what our environment itself is—the environment itself has become an art form.

But the training of perception in regard to new technologies and their effects has never been undertaken, except indirectly by the artist. Someone said once, "We don't know who discovered water but we are pretty sure it wasn't a fish!" We are all in this position, being surrounded by some environment or element that blinds us totally; the message of the fish theme is a very important one, and just how to get through to people that way is quite a problem.

We have from the moment of birth a fear of the new environment. We always prefer the old one. We

learn by going from the familiar to the unfamiliar. In practice, this means whenever we account for the unfamiliar, we translate it instantly into something we already know. In other words, we refuse to look at the unfamiliar. Our built-in mechanisms of cognition seem to make it impossible for us to recognize the new until we have translated it into the old.

Now there is a technique for discovering the new in spite of our built-in pattern map, and that is by inventory. If you make an inventory of all the effects of the telephone or radio on a society, you will discover a pattern. You have seen the transistor radios teaching children to make their own space bubbles for privacy. Our kids don't listen to radios; they use them as space bubbles for privacy. This has never been studied, but the radio, the use of radio as space in the space age is the type of thing that is having tremendous effect on the lives of the young. You can study these effects by inventory, what effect it has on clothing, on cars, on schooling and so on. It is very difficult to study them by any single concept or point of view.

These inventories yield awareness of new forms that you couldn't get by any other means. This is also where the young can enter the field of research. The young are very good at making inventories of their surroundings; they can become hunters by roaming the evironment, and at the same time getting smart.

Dr. Seitz: I think we have another question here.

Dr. Melville Green (NBS): Professor McLuhan brought before this conference the idea of mythsmyths as a spring of action.

Dr. Seitz and Dr. Casimir later on referred to myth in the relationship of classical technology to science. We heard about the myths of technology in developing countries. Myths seem more useful than we may wish to admit. Perhaps what is necessary is a truer understanding of the positive role of myths.

Dr. McLuhan: The word myth is the Greek word for work. Mythos is a work, and is considered a breakthrough. Mythos has a way of explaining some event. The myth is a way of explaining a complex process in a few phrases. As a technique of explanation of cause and effect, it is coming back into much use. Many of the things we call natural laws or ways of describing events are in the old Greek sense of the word, myths.