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Understanding McLuhan
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Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso
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06940_Field_TCUM T505.txt
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1996-04-10
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924b
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16 lines
In the 1930s, when millions of comic books were
inundating the young with gore, nobody seemed to notice that
emotionally the violence of millions of cars in our streets was
incomparably more hysterical than anything that could ever be
printed. All the rhinos and hippos and elephants in the world, if
gathered in one city, could not begin to create the menace and
explosive intensity of the hourly and daily experience of the
internal-combustion engine. Are people really expected to
internalize—live with—all this power and explosive violence,
without processing and siphoning it off into some form of
fantasy for compensation and balance?
In the silent pictures of the 1920s a great many of the
sequences involved the motorcar and policemen. Since the film
was then accepted as an optical illusion, the cop was the
principal reminder of the existence of ground rules in the game