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Understanding McLuhan
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06487_Field_TCUM T52.txt
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1996-04-10
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960b
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when it meets any hot medium of the mechanical, uniform, and
repetitive kind. The medium of money or wheel or writing, or any
other form of specialist speed-up of exchange and information,
will serve to fragment a tribal structure. Similarly, a very much
greater speed-up, such as occurs with electricity, may serve to
restore a tribal pattern of intense involvement such as took
place with the introduction of radio in Europe, and is now
tending to happen as a result of TV in America. Specialist
technologies detribalize. The nonspecialist electric technology
retribalizes. The process of upset resulting from a new
distribution of skills is accompanied by much culture lag in
which people feel compelled to look at new situations as if they
were old ones, and come up with ideas of “population
explosion” in an age of implosion. Newton, in an age of clocks,
managed to present the physical universe in the image of a
clock.