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Understanding McLuhan
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06612_Field_TCUM T177.txt
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1996-04-10
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than the digital computer needs numbers. Electricity points the
way to an extension of the process of consciousness itself, on
a world scale, and without any verbalization whatever. Such a
state of collective awareness may have been the preverbal
condition of men. Language as the technology of human
extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so
well, may have been the “Tower of Babel” by which men sought
to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the
promise of a means of instant translation of any code or
language into any other code or language. The computer, in
short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of
universal understanding and unity. The next logical step would
seem to be, not to translate, but to by-pass languages in favor
of a general cosmic consciousness which might be very like the
collective unconscious dreamt of by Bergson. The condition of
“weightlessness,” that biologists say promises a physical