Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/06681_Field_TCUM T246.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 816b | 16 lines

when you use well-known brands.”

     Like money and clocks and all other forms of
measurement, numbers acquired a separate life and intensity
with the growth of literacy. Nonliterate societies had small use
for numbers, and today the nonliterate digital computer
substitutes “yes” and “no” for numbers. The computer is
strong on contours, weak on digits. In effect, then, the electric
age brings number back into unity with visual and auditory
experience, for good or ill.

     Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West  originated in
large part from his concern with the new mathematics. Non-
Euclidean geometries, on one hand, and the rise of functions in
number theory, on the other, seemed to Spengler to spell the
end of Western man. He had not grasped the fact that the