MCMANUS: What now briefly is this thing called media ecology?
MCLUHAN: It means arranging various media to help each other so they won’t cancel each other out, to buttress one medium with another. You might say, for example, that radio is a bigger help to literacy than television, but television might be a very wonderful aid to teaching languages. So, you can do some things on some media that you cannot do on others. Therefore, if you watch the whole field, you can prevent this waste that comes by one cancelling out the other.
MCMANUS: But do you think that perhaps at the end of your studies of media ecology, you're going to advise a cut-down on watching television? $500 for anyone who will give it up for a day?
MCLUHAN: Europeans have cut back on that almost down to nothing long ago because they realized that it threatened literate values very much. An hour a week is about what the French child gets for television.