understanding of television remains controversial, particularly his insistence that it is not primarily a “visual” medium. He believed the relatively indistinct quality of the television image, its composition by points of electronic light, meant that viewers, in effect, completed the image in their heads in an almost tactile fashion, like a person feeling out the contours of a piece of sculpture. The eye was used, in other words, but it did not perceive the visual space of definitions and boundaries. It took in the acoustic space of echoes and resonances.
The result, McLuhan felt, was that society, under the impact of television, was now biased towards in-depth involvement in things and an effacement of old boundaries and definitions. Western art, as exemplified by cubism in painting and the resonating verbal fragments in the poetry
