Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/07020_Field_TCUM T585.txt

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

than a century of telegraph news reporting, nobody has seen
that “human interest” is the electronic or depth dimension of
immediate involvement in news. With telegraph, there ended
that separation of interests and division of faculties that are
certainly not without their magnificent monuments of toil and
ingenuity. But with telegraph, came the integral insistence and
wholeness of Dickens, and of Florence Nightingale, and of
Harriet Beecher Stowe. The electric gives powerful voices to the
weak and suffering, and sweeps aside the bureaucratic
specialisms and job descriptions of the mind tied to a manual
of instructions. The “human interest” dimension is simply that
of immediacy of participation in the experience of others that
occurs with instant information. People become instant, too, in
their response of pity or of fury when they must share the
common extension of the central nervous system with the
whole of mankind. Under these conditions, “conspicuous