home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Understanding McLuhan
/
Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso
/
pc
/
mcluhan.dxr
/
06484_Field_TCUM T49.txt
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1996-04-10
|
934b
|
16 lines
monopoly. But the typical reversal occurred when extremes of
monopoly brought back the corporation, with its impersonal
empire over many lives. The hotting-up of the medium of
writing to repeatable print intensity led to nationalism and the
religious wars of the sixteenth century. The heavy and unwieldy
media, such as stone, are time binders. Used for writing, they
are very cool indeed, and serve to unify the ages; whereas
paper is a hot medium that serves to unify spaces horizontally,
both in political and entertainment empires.
Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool
one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar,
and a book for less than dialogue. With print many earlier forms
were excluded from life and art, and many were given strange
new intensity. But our own time is crowded with examples of
the principle that the hot form excludes, and the cool one