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Understanding McLuhan
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Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso
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06947_Field_TCUM T512.txt
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1996-04-10
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996b
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16 lines
such gestures would have been meaningless. It wouldn’t have
paid off. Now, it pays to laugh at the mechanical and the
merely standardized. John Keats could question the central
glory of classless American society by saying, “If you’ve seen
one part of America, you’ve seen it all,” and that the car gave
the American the opportunity, not to travel and experience
adventure, but “to make himself more and more common.”
Since TV, it has become popular to regard the more and more
uniform and repeatable products of industry with the same
contempt that a Brahmin like Henry James might have felt for a
chamber-pot dynasty in 1890. It is true that automation is
about to produce the unique and custom-built at assembly-line
speed and cheapness. Automation can manage the bespoke
car or coat with less fuss than we ever produced the
standardized ones. But the unique product cannot circulate in
our market or distribution setups. As a result, we are moving