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Understanding McLuhan
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Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso
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06772_Field_TCUM T337.txt
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1996-04-10
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837b
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16 lines
This is the difference between marching soldiers and ballet.
It is a necessary approach in understanding media and
technology to realize that when the spell of the gimmick or an
extension of our bodies is new, there comes narcosis or
numbing to the newly amplified area. The complaints about
clocks did not begin until the electric age had made their
mechanical sort of time starkly incongruous. In our electric
century the mechanical time-kept city looks like an aggregation
of somnambulists and zombies, made familiar in the early part
of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land .
On a planet reduced to village size by new media, cities
themselves appear quaint and odd, like archaic forms already
overlaid with new patterns of culture. However, when
mechanical clocks had been given great new force and