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Understanding McLuhan
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Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso
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06951_Field_TCUM T516.txt
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1996-04-10
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the first classless society in the world. The car gave to the
democratic cavalier his horse and armor and haughty insolence
in one package, transmogrifying the knight into a misguided
missile. In fact, the American car did not level downward, but
upward, toward the aristocratic idea. Enormous increase and
distribution of power had also been the equalizing force of
literacy and various other forms of mechanization. The
willingness to accept the car as a status symbol, restricting its
more expansive form to the use of higher executives, is not a
mark of the car and mechanical age, but of the electric forces
that are now ending this mechanical age of uniformity and
standardization, and recreating the norms of status and role.
When the motorcar was new, it exercised the typical
mechanical pressure of explosion and separation of functions.
It broke up family life, or so it seemed, in the 1920s. It