we listen to anyone speaking is merely a representative 
     member of a large class of sounds which we have agreed 
     to accept as symbolically identical in spite of the actual 
     differences between them.

     In this passage he not only notes the ingraining of lineal, 
sequential habits, but, even more important, points out the 
visual homogenizing of experience in print culture, and the 
relegation of auditory and other sensuous complexity to the 
background. The reduction of experience to a single sense, the 
visual, as a result of typography leads him to speculate that 
“the more closely we confine our data for reasoning about 
things to data that come to us through one and the same 
sense channel the more apt we are to be correct in our 
reasoning.” (p. 54) However, this type of reduction or 
distortion of all experience to the scale of one sense only is in