Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/06599_Field_TCUM T164.txt

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

image cannot be met by mere program changes. Imaginative
strategy based on adequate diagnosis would prescribe a
corresponding depth or structural approach to the existing
literary and visual world. If we persist in a conventional
approach to these developments our traditional culture will be
swept aside as scholasticism was in the sixteenth century. Had
the Schoolmen with their complex oral culture understood the
Gutenberg technology, they could have created a new synthesis
of written and oral education, instead of bowing out of the
picture and allowing the merely visual page to take over the
educational enterprise. The oral Schoolmen did not meet the
new visual challenge of print, and the resulting expansion or
explosion of Gutenberg technology was in many respects an
impoverishment of the culture, as historians like Mumford are
now beginning to explain. Arnold Toynbee, in A Study of
History , in considering “the nature of growths of civilizations,”