Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/06885_Field_TCUM T450.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 1KB | 16 lines

     Perhaps that is the readiest way to grasp the meaning of
the photograph in creating a world of accelerated transience.
For the relation we have to “today’s newspaper,” or verbal jazz,
is the same that people feel for fashions. Fashion is not a way
of being informed or aware, but a way of being with  it. That,
however, is merely to draw attention to a negative aspect of
the photograph. Positively, the effect of speeding up temporal
sequence is to abolish time, much as the telegraph and cable
abolished space. Of course the photograph does both. It wipes
out our national frontiers and cultural barriers, and involves us
in The Family of Man , regardless of any particular point of view.
A picture of a group of persons of any hue whatever is a picture
of people, not of “colored people.” That is the logic of the
photograph, politically speaking. But the logic of the
photograph is neither verbal nor syntactical, a condition which
renders literary culture quite helpless to cope with the