among the Inuit, whose oral culture, he told McLuhan, was an ultimate extension of Eliot’s “auditory imagination.” It was a culture biased toward the ear, in which sound, not visual space, is the organizing principle. Sound has no centre and no boundaries; it is more emotive and visceral than sight. Where sound structures the world, linear reason, linear time, the habit of drawing explicit connections between things, does not arise. These things must await a world in which sight is the organizing principle, because visible objects do have centres and boundaries, and reality can be imagined in the form of diagrams and links.
The one world McLuhan called “acoustic space.” The other, of course, was “visual space.” The invention of the phonetic alphabet, according to McLuhan, represented the
