first great weakening of the acoustic world. The invention of print was the second. It introduced the principle of uniformity—McLuhan observed that nothing in a printed edition of, say, Plato’s Republic was as important as the fact students could find the same paragraph on the same page of any copy of that edition. It emphasized the visual almost to the exclusion of the aural—McLuhan observed that, after printing, nobody read books aloud, as had been the habit with written manuscripts. Boundaries, lines, the habit of seeing explicit links between things, invaded the Western psyche with a vengeance. In their wake came Western concepts of reason, time, history, individuality.
Printing established a supremacy of visual space in the West which went unchallenged until the invention of the electronic media—especially television. McLuhan’s
