Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/07132_Field_TCUM T697.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 964b | 16 lines

Radio provided the first massive experience of electronic
implosion, that reversal of the entire direction and meaning of
literate Western civilization. For tribal peoples, for those whose
entire social existence is an extension of family life, radio will
continue to be a violent experience. Highly literate societies,
that have long subordinated family life to individualist stress in
business and politics, have managed to absorb and to
neutralize the radio implosion without revolution. Not so, those
communities that have had only brief or superficial experience
of literacy. For them, radio is utterly explosive.

     To understand such effects, it is necessary to see literacy
as typographic technology, applied not only to the rationalizing
of the entire procedures of production and marketing, but to
law and education and city planning, as well. The principles of
continuity, uniformity, and repeatability derived from print