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Understanding McLuhan
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07022_Field_TCUM T587.txt
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1996-04-10
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16 lines
into the fixed postures of mechanical writing and printing, the
iconic forms of the electric age are as opaque, or even as
invisible, as hormones to the unaided eye. It is the artist’s job
to try to dislocate older media into postures that permit
attention to the new. To this end, the artist must ever play and
experiment with new means of arranging experience, even
though the majority of his audience may prefer to remain fixed
in their old perceptual attitudes. The most that can be done by
the prose commentator is to capture the media in as many
characteristic and revealing postures as he can manage to
discover. Let us examine a series of these postures of the
telegraph, as this new medium encounters other media like the
book and the newspaper.
By 1848 the telegraph, then only four years old,
compelled several major American newspapers to form a