Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/06564_Field_TCUM T129.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 923b | 16 lines

higher apes to grasp and let go, with the strategy of the stock
market speculators. It is all capsulated in the popular variant
on Robert Browning: “A man’s reach must exceed his grasp or
what’s a metaphor.” All media are active metaphors in their
power to translate experience into new forms. The spoken word
was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his
environment in order to grasp it in a new way. Words are a kind
of information retrieval that can range over the total
environment and experience at high speed. Words are complex
systems of metaphors and symbols that translate experience
into our uttered or outered senses. They are a technology of
explicitness. By means of translation of immediate sense
experience into vocal symbols the entire world can be evoked
and retrieved at any instant.

     In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more