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06795_Field_TCUM T360.txt
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1996-04-10
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923b
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16 lines
Hence it is that other writers have confined
themselves to a verbal description of the plants; indeed
some of them have not so much as described them even,
but have contented themselves for the most part with a
bare recital of their names . . .
We are confronted here once more with that basic
function of media—to store and to expedite information.
Plainly, to store is to expedite, since what is stored is also more
accessible than what has to be gathered. The fact that visual
information about flowers and plants cannot be stored verbally
also points to the fact that science in the Western world has
long been dependent on the visual factor. Nor is this surprising
in a literate culture based on the technology of the alphabet,
one that reduces even spoken language to a visual mode. As
electricity has created multiple non-visual means of storing and