Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/06506_Field_TCUM T71.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 896b | 16 lines

the sound of the name, so that in self-defense we add: “How do
you spell your name?” Whereas, in an ear culture, the sound  of
a man’s name is the overwhelming fact, as Joyce knew when he
said in Finnegans Wake , “Who gave you that numb?” For the
name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never
recovers.

     Another vantage point from which to test the difference
between hot and cold media is the practical joke. The hot
literary medium excludes the practical and participant aspect
of the joke so completely that Constance Rourke, in her
American Humor , considers it as no joke at all. To literary
people, the practical joke with its total physical involvement is
as distasteful as the pun that derails us from the smooth and
uniform progress that is typographic order. Indeed, to the
literary person who is quite unaware of the intensely abstract