Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/07081_Field_TCUM T646.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 950b | 16 lines

disappears, and electric automation brings about a withdrawal
of the work force from industry. Instead of being automated
themselves—fragmented in task and function—as had been the
tendency under mechanization, men in the electric age move
increasingly to involvement in diverse jobs simultaneously, and
to the work of learning, and to the programming of computers.

     This revolutionary logic inherent in the electric age was
made fairly clear in the early electric forms of telegraph and
telephone that inspired the “talking machine.” These new forms
that did so much to recover the vocal, auditory, and mimetic
world that had been repressed by the printed word, also
inspired the strange new rhythms of “the jazz age,” the various
forms of syncopation and symbolist discontinuity that, like
relativity and quantum physics, heralded the end of the
Gutenberg era with its smooth, uniform lines of type and