Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/06563_Field_TCUM T128.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 1KB | 16 lines

     The tendency of neurotic children to lose neurotic traits
when telephoning has been a puzzle to psychiatrists. Some
stutterers lose their stutter when they switch to a foreign
language. That technologies are ways of translating one kind of
knowledge into another mode has been expressed by Lyman
Bryson in the phrase “technology is explicitness.” Translation is
thus a “spelling-out” of forms of knowing. What we call
“mechanization” is a translation of nature, and of our own
natures, into amplified and specialized forms. Thus the quip in
Finnegans Wake , “What bird has done yesterday man may do
next year,” is a strictly literal observation of the courses of
technology. The power of technology as dependent on
alternately grasping and letting go in order to enlarge the
scope of action has been observed as the power of the higher
arboreal apes as compared with those that are on the ground.
Elias Canetti made the proper association of this power of the