Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/06881_Field_TCUM T446.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 999b | 16 lines

and condescension to “pop kulch” and “mass entertainment.”
It was in this spirit of bulldog opacity that the scholastic
philosophers failed to meet the challenge of the printed book in
the sixteenth century. The vested interests of acquired
knowledge and conventional wisdom have always been by-
passed and engulfed by new media. The study of this process,
however, whether for the purpose of fixity or of change, has
scarcely begun. The notion that self interest confers a keener
eye for recognizing and controlling the processes of change is
quite without foundation, as witness the motorcar industry.
Here is a world of obsolescence as surely doomed to swift
erosion as was the enterprise of the buggy- and wagon-makers
in 1915. Yet does General Motors, for example, know, or even
suspect, anything about the effect of the TV image on the
users of motorcars? The magazine enterprises are similarly
undermined by the TV image and its effect on the advertising