THE MESSAGE, THE MEDIUM, THE RESONANCE

...His comments here center on allowing the student to participate in the process of communication, but they lack the deftness and sure-footed quality of his previous discussion...

...They bring certain feelings and certain memories to the media and most importantly they consume the media in various ways...

...and it has altered a sense of direction--high amplification sound systems bathe the listener in sound from everywhere...

...The opponents of a Life Amendment may finally be correct...

...When she reaches ten, the action is frozen and the viewer sees a mushroom cloud and hears Lyndon Johnson's voice pleading for peace...

...One must admit that this committee exceeded its estimated competence...

...But if the people, the State legislatures and the Congress join the chant, that is a certain sign that we wish to crown the judicial magistracy and legitimate its word as our final law...

...A person with a telephone can maintain a wider network of social contacts than in pre-telephone days...

...Peter In the New Testament Edited by RAYMOND E. BROWN, KARL P. DONFRIED and JOHN REUMANN Augsburg, $1.95 JOHN L. MeKENZIE It is not written in John 3:16 that God so loved the world that he did not send a committee, but this ecclesiastical irreverence has circulated for a long time...

...The studies may have to go even beyond this period...

...Peter's the line in which Jesus tells Peter to get out of his sight, the only disciple who was ever addressed in these terms...

...why and how did Peter become the chief shepherd...

...The Responsive Chord has its share of media book flaws...

...The spot did resonate with the fear that many Americans had of Goldwater's hard-line policy...

...The spot was run only once during "Monday Night at the Movies," and, contrary to folk belief, never mentioned the name of Barry Goldwater...

...Object they surely will, with inconsistency and distrust of the people and of their right to amend in this instance, Unhesitatingly, the call should go forth for the Congress to move an amendment that at the least restores to the States legislative power to decide whether and how human life-and-death questions shall be dealt with in the criminal law and in regulation of the fateful actions of physicians...

...Via electricity, communication has altered a sense of time---we can know about worldwide events almost instantly...

...I was offended by the footnotes...

...Known as "the Daisy spot," it showed a little girl counting the petals on a daisy...

...As the authors say, this is nothing new in the world of theology, although it has not been said by many Catholics until quite recently...

...For much of Schwartz's work has been directed towards getting people to buy Cokes, perfumes, Lyndon Johnsons and Ogden Reids...

...Much of the best media work in recent years can be traced back to various articles appearing there...

...Yet the committee is willing to concede that there is more to be said about Peter than the New Testament says...

...This is its strength...

...He is more concerned with the macro-ethical question of some people having the money and power to avail themselves of the most Commonweal: 315 contemporary theory and practice in media design and others not, Hence The Responsive Chord...

...In any case, anyone who believes that there was need to submit to the States an "equal rights" amendment, going beyond the Fourteenth in guaranteeing equal rights for women, cannot with any consistency object to an amendment going beyond the Fourteenth, and correcting the Court's interpretation of it in Wade and Bolton, now being submitted to the States for possible adoption into our fundamental law...

...Schwartz says: "To achieve a behavioral effect, whether persuading someone to buy a product or teaching a person about history, one designs stimuli that will resonate with elements in a communication environment to produce that effect...

...For half that space he then discusses its educational applications...

...It is like many new media books in its random organization of material, and, like the others, it can be opened anywhere and read without appreciable loss...

...On pages 44-45 he writes: "My wife loves to tell of a neighbor who was sitting in a park with her baby when another woman passed and commented, 'Oh, what a beautiful baby.' 'Yes,' replied the neighbor, 'but you should see his pictures.'" The very same story opens Daniel Boorstin's The Image (1960), ends a Carpenter chapter in Oh, What A Blow That Phantom Gave Me (1973), and started a recent McLuhan lecture at Teacher's College...

...Well, so do his successors often appear in history...

...Schwartz shows the reader through his work, his thoughts, introducing his children and his wife and that suspicious neighbor lady with the kid's pictures...

...The Responsive Chord is neither as interlaced as McLuhan's work nor as anecdotal as Carpenter's...

...Firmly rooted in his extensive and successful work in commercial and political advertising, it is the least speculative part of the book...

...There is a peculiar intimacy to the telephone: it allows instant contact and instant termination without protracted amenities...

...Schwartz has a gushy accolade on the cover of the book from the same author he exalts a few pages into the book...

...Schwartz has an elucidating discussion of a Carpenter-McLuhan article on acoustic auditory space, that media-ether of the Global Village...

...Peter is called a shepherd in the New Testament, but so are others...

...Schwartz doesn't seem to anguish over the micro-ethical question of a good product versus a lessgood product or a Johnson or a Goldwater in 1964...

...In a short page and a half, Schwartz gets in and out of the question of television and violence...

...if against the one but not the other "constitutional morality" can be sustained...

...Tony Schwartz understands McLuhan...

...it is not surprising that the line in the dome, Matthew 16:18-19, gets more attention than any other passage...

...It is not like reading two books at once...

...They are both dominical sayings, as the exegetes call them...

...Or, as Carpenter summarized it: "We respond only to what we recognize, to what holds meaning for us...

...This is not to dismiss the content of the medium...

...It is an instrument of control, giving its user the option of changing a social situation in a word or two and a click...

...Schwartz is strongest when discussing his resonance theory of communication...

...31 May 1974:316...

...This too seems impossible...

...More than any particular snapshot or any particular telephone conversation, the form, the medium introduces a message, a change in human behavior...

...America...

...nevertheless, signs of multiple authorship appear...

...electronic communication has altered a sense of distance--telephones take us almost anywhere...

...The issue is the right of choice or decision...

...But the line does come from the same context from which the line in the dome comes...

...The authors speak somewhat ambiguously of the "image" of Peter and the "trajectories" of the image of Peter--or rather of the images...

...Or--back to the Bomb-an understanding of nuclear fission is more important than any specific application of that knowledge...

...Every text where Peter appears in the New Testament is studied...

...Here a committee has attempted what many have said a committee cannot do, to write a book...

...It is equally without evidence that Peter ever served as a bishop for any particular congregation...

...I would not want to inscribe in the dome of St...

...He demonstrates that wondrous phenomenon known as media ecology: the recycling of old ideas, anecdotes and shards of theory...

...For fifty pages he elaborates the applications of resonance theory in commercial and political advertising...

...RONALD CHRIST is editor of Review, published by the Center for Inter-American Relations...

...For example, the telephone has changed the quality of socializing...

...one is moved to ask whether Peter is more important than Jesus or--since this seems impossible--Peter is more troublesome than .Jesus...

...We know, of course, that it is not Peter but the successors of Peter who cause concern, and that the reason for a study of Peter in the New Testament is to see whether the New Testament offers any theological justification for the position claimed by the successors of Peter...

...But the coupling of the bath-book (a book you get into) with his very personal style creates a provocative and comprehensible work...

...The contrast between this slender volume and the solemn high ecumenical dedication to Peter struck me as paradoxical...

...For years I have been telling students that if they cannot get it into the text, perhaps it is not worth saying in the context of their writing...

...BOOKSlll I I,I I THE MESSAGE, THE MEDIUM, THE RESONANCE DANIEL MACK The Responsive Chord Anchor, $6.95 TONY SCHWARTZ Ten years ago Marshall McLuhan declared in Understanding Media that the medium is the messagemthat the real message of any medium is "the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs 9 . . it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action...

...This he attributes to the manner in which the senses and brain receive the fleeting television images...

...There appears to be an implication that Christians are in much more substantial agreement about Jesus than about Peter, and this in turn has implications on the degree to which Christian unity has been achieved...

...and other books, teaches theology at DePaul University in Chicago...

...Home media (snapshots, movies) have transformed otherwise private social gatherings into events where there is a concern for the record to be made of the event...

...It is clear, chatty and as informal as the Polaroid pictures which illustrate it...

...The issue is the right of a people through the legislative process to set the "credentials," the criteria, the signs of humanity to be used in making life-and-death decisions9 Setting the outer limits of the human community should not be allowed to pass into the hands of private individuals, one, two, or many...

...For those who remember some of the things Martin Luther wrote about the successors of Peter it is highly significant that the theologians of the Lutheran Church and of the Roman Catholic Church could reach the agreement exhibited in this book...

...The answer of the authors is that these questions cannot be answered from the New Testament...

...That Lutherans and Catholics could agree on a statement of Peter's position in the New Testament suggests certain features to be expected in the conclusions...

...Committees produce non-books...

...He maintains that television provides a collective set of experiences (the news report s , the drama-action series) from which people draw models for action and reaction...

...Finally he says that the continuous portrayal of "the good life" on television increases the frustration of viewers who do not have a good life, and when this is coupled with the other two effects, violence could result...

...Peter was a fisherman, but so were others...

...It is clearly enough written so that those readers with the specific concern of counterbalancing commercial media power can at least reach a good understanding of the rules of battle...

...dures against an "imperial Presidency" for acts in derogation of powers vested elsewhere by the Constitution or for acts having adverse impact on our system of government, and if then the Congress does not bestir itself to use the remedy of constitutional amendment to correct a decision of an imperial Court that likewise has effects in derogation of powers vested elsewhere by the Constitution and adverse impact on the division between the judicial and the legislative power...

...It would be undefendable if impeachment may be used to chasten the executive magistracy and not an amendment to chasten the judicial magistracy...

...The ecumenical impact of this agreement is enormous, and that word is O O0 O O O O00 REVIEWERS DANIEL MACK was until recently a talkshow host on Station WRVR in New York...

...Both these men worked closely with a very gifted team of scholars in Toronto throughout the 1950s publishing a journal on communications, Explorations in Communication...

...and Schwartz designs his messages for that purpose...

...The committee effectively agrees that the position of the successors of Peter in the Roman Church was created by the Roman Church...

...But that must be rightly understood...

...FATHER JOHN L. McKENZaE, author of Did 1 Say That...

...With all due veneration to his sainted memory, Peter often appears in the New Testament as a jerk...

...There can be no objection to that manner of speaking when the Court does it...

...When I began to read this book I had just finished a review of a short book which attempted to present recent developments in Christology to the general public...

...Schwartz designs stimuli to elicit meaning from an audience by resonating or helping to recall information already in their minds...

...The things suggested are perhaps most sharply expressed in a sentence which I am sure the writers did not intend to be so sharp: "Historically, we have no reliable evidence that Peter ever served as a presbyter for a particular congregation, not even for the Roman congregation" (154...

...and it is our chief recourse for insuring that what Freund called "constitutional morality" shall be a force in the interplay of the separate powers in our government...

...it is more like watching two different football games on two TV screens in two different rooms...

...One sees clearly enough that the New Testament contains no evidence for a Roman primacy...

...at least the authors do not mention any evidence...

...In this regard, the extent to which a Supreme Court decision is popularly and automatically believed to be the last word on what the law is is also a measure of how legislative and amendatory authority has slipped from "the legislative assembly9 The Court, of course, in Bolton (issued, I suppose, one minute after Wade) ceremonially refers to Wade in the matter of what the law is...

...The power that Schwartz commands with his resonance theory design of commercials comes from an understanding of the audience...

...It's much like an early atomic scientist busy on the Bomb, turning aside and saying, "Oh, there are many peaceful uses too...

...Often, the concern for the historical record of the event becomes the center of the gathering itself...

...This develops into a duel between author and footnotes in which the footnotes finally win and the text entirely disappears...

...The same ecumenical commission which produced this study has another committee working on Peter in patristic literature...

...Schwartz really believes the medium is the message, that an understanding of acoustic, auditory space and resonance is more important in the long term than particular ads are in the short-run...

...folklore lives on in anecdote dispersion among media writers...

...It's a sight repatterning of perception to include the client's product...

...One high point of Schwartz' work was his 1964 television spot for Lyndon Johnson...

...His major interest, which is in sound, has led him to create thousands of radio and television commercials, and he has worked on many political campaigns, mostly for liberal Democrats...

...Too few people have understood the importance of this effect, especially in a world burgeoning with multiplying do-dads...

...The book builds on the media theories of Marshall McLuhan and an31 May 1974:314 thropologist Edmund Carpenter...

...This surely is what is meant when the authors conclude by calling the New Testament study of Peter "background for ecumenical discussion of the role of the Papacy in the universal Church...

...He claims that while there is no causal connection between them, television does condition its viewers to respond instantly and impulsively, without time for meditation...

...He knows they are anything but empty pitchers waiting for the milk of commercial America...

...If the Catholics have given something to Scripture, the Lutherans have given something to tradition...

...The amendatory procedure is more legitimate still...

...and in fact the authors could agree because the New Testament contains no reliable evidence that Peter had any kind of primacy...

...Since the late 1940s, when he developed a portable tape recorder, he has done pioneering work in the effects of the media...

...The Responsive Chord is a collection of Schwartz' theories, thoughts, anecdotes, insights and speculations on the effects of the media, particularly on how radio and television affect thinking and behavior...

...I am reminded of something produced in The New Yorker about 1940, I think by the late Frank Sullivan, in which the first word was footnoted...

...how did the Seal Of the Fisherman become the symbol of supreme authority on documents addressed to the whole Church...

...The audience isn't "taught" about a product, but is encouraged to recall a situation where the product would be helpful...