Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/07028_Field_TCUM T593.txt

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

been afforded for the purpose of encouraging their circulation.”
The telegraph quickly weakened this centre-margin pattern and,
more important, by intensifying the volume of news, it greatly
weakened the role of editorial opinions. News has steadily
overtaken views as a shaper of public attitudes, though few
examples of this change are quite so striking as the sudden
growth of the Florence Nightingale image in the British world.
And yet nothing has been more misunderstood than the power
of the telegraph in this matter. Perhaps the most decisive
feature is this. The natural dynamic of the book and, also,
newspaper is to create a unified national outlook on a
centralized pattern. All literate people, therefore, experience a
desire for an extension of the most enlightened opinions in a
uniform horizontal and homogeneous pattern to the “most
backward areas,” and to the least literate minds. The telegraph
ended that hope. It decentralized the newspaper world so