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Understanding McLuhan
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Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso
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06890_Field_TCUM T455.txt
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1996-04-10
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their own cases. In the same way, the tourist who arrives at the
Leaning Tower of Pisa, or the Grand Canyon of Arizona, can
now merely check his reactions to something with which he has
long been familiar, and take his own pictures of the same.
To lament that the packaged tour, like the photograph,
cheapens and degrades by making all places easy of access, is
to miss most of the game. It is to make value judgments with
fixed reference to the fragmentary perspective of literary
culture. It is the same position that considers a literary
landscape as superior to a movie travelogue. For the untrained
awareness, all reading and all movies, like all travel, are equally
banal and unnourishing as experience. Difficulty of access does
not confer adequacy of perception, though it may involve an
object in an aura of pseudovalues, as with a gem, a movie star,
or an old master. This now brings us to the factual core of the