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Understanding McLuhan
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Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso
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06780_Field_TCUM T345.txt
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1996-03-19
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909b
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16 lines
this fact awaited the electronic age, which found that instant
speeds abolish time and space, and return man to an integral
and primitive awareness.
Today not only clock-time, but the wheel itself, is
obsolescent and is retracting into animal form under the
impulse of greater and greater speeds. In the poem above,
Andrew Marvell’s intuition that clock-time could be defeated by
speed was quite sound. At present the mechanical begins to
yield to organic unity under conditions of electric speeds. Man
now can look back at two or three thousand years of varying
degrees of mechanization with full awareness of the mechanical
as an interlude between two great organic periods of culture. In
1911 the Italian sculptor Boccioni said, “We are primitives of an
unknown culture.” Half a century later we know a bit more
about the new culture of the electronic age, and that