Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/06459_Field_TCUM T24.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 953b | 16 lines

now say, “The medium is the message” quite naturally. Before
the electric speed and total field, it was not obvious that the
medium is the message. The message, it seemed, was the
“content,” as people used to ask what a painting was about .
Yet they never thought to ask what a melody was about, nor
what a house or a dress was about. In such matters, people
retained some sense of the whole pattern, of form and function
as a unity. But in the electric age this integral idea of structure
and configuration has become so prevalent that educational
theory has taken up the matter. Instead of working with
specialized “problems” in arithmetic, the structural approach
now follows the linea of force in the field of number and has
small children meditating about number theory and “sets.”

     Cardinal Newman said of Napoleon, “He understood the
grammar of gunpowder.” Napoleon had paid some attention to