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Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso
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06642_Field_TCUM T207.txt
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1996-04-10
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In the chapter on the wheel it will be shown that
transport without wheels had played a big role before the
wheel, some of which was by sledge, over both snow and bogs.
Much of it was by pack animal—woman being the first pack
animal. Most wheel-less transport in the past, however, was by
river and by sea, a fact that is today as richly expressed as ever
in the location and form of the great cities of the world. Some
writers have observed that man’s oldest beast of burden was
woman, because the male had to be free to run interference for
the woman, as ball-carrier, as it were. But that phase belonged
to the pre-wheel stage of transport, when there was only the
tractless waste of man the hunter and food-gatherer. Today,
when the greatest volume of transport consists in the moving
of information, the wheel and the road are undergoing
recession and obsolescence; but in the first instance, given the
pressure for, and from, wheels, there had to be roads to