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Understanding McLuhan
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06754_Field_TCUM T319.txt
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1996-04-10
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translated that culture into the great visual vortex of the
Graeco-Roman world. The alphabet is a one-way process of
reduction of nonliterate cultures into the specialist visual
fragments of our Western world. Money is an adjunct of that
specialist alphabetic technology, raising even the Gutenberg
form of mechanical repeatability to new intensity. As the
alphabet neutralized the divergencies of primitive cultures by
translation of their complexities into simple visual terms, so
representative money reduced moral values in the nineteenth
century. As paper expedited the power of the alphabet to
reduce the oral barbarians to Roman uniformity of civilization,
so paper money enabled Western industry to blanket the globe.
Shortly before the advent of paper money, the greatly
increased volume of information movement in European
newsletters and newspapers created the image and concept of