Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/06673_Field_TCUM T238.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 940b | 16 lines

     In the theatre, at a ball, at a ball game, in church, every
individual enjoys all those others present. The pleasure of being
among the masses is the sense of the joy in the multiplication
of numbers, which has long been suspect among the literate
members of Western society.

     In such society, the separation of the individual from the
group in space (privacy), and in thought (“point of view”), and
in work (specialism), has had the cultural and technological
support of literacy, and its attendant galaxy of fragmented
industrial and political institutions. But the power of the printed
word to create the homogenized social man grew steadily until
our time, creating the paradox of the “mass mind” and the
mass militarism of citizen armies. Pushed to the mechanized
extreme, letters have often seemed to produce effects opposite
to civilization, just as numbering in earlier times seemed to