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Understanding McLuhan
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Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso
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06808_Field_TCUM T373.txt
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1996-04-10
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It was thanks to the print that Dickens became a comic
writer. He began as a provider of copy for a popular cartoonist.
To consider the comics here, after “The Print,” is to fix
attention upon the persistent print-like, and even crude
woodcut, characteristics of our twentieth-century comics. It is
by no means easy to perceive how the same qualities of print
and woodcut could reappear in the mosaic mesh of the TV
image. TV is so difficult a subject for literary people that it has
to be approached obliquely. From the three million dots per
second on TV, the viewer is able to accept, in an iconic grasp,
only a few dozen, seventy or so, from which to shape an image.
The image thus made is as crude as that of the comics. It is for
this reason that the print and the comics provide a useful
approach to understanding the TV image, for they offer very
little visual information or connected detail. Painters and
sculptors, however, can easily understand TV, because they