home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Understanding McLuhan
/
Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso
/
pc
/
mcluhan.dxr
/
07233_Field_TCUM T798.txt
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1996-04-10
|
939b
|
16 lines
to remark that it was the literate American colonists who were
first to insist on a rifled barrel and improved gunsights. They
improved the old muskets, creating the Kentucky rifle. It was
the highly literate Bostonians who outshot the British regulars.
Marksmanship is not the gift of the native or the woodsman,
but of the literate colonist. So runs this argument that links
gunfire itself with the rise of perspective, and with the
extension of the visual power in literacy. In the Marine Corps it
has been found that there is a definite correlation between
education and marksmanship. Not for the nonliterate is our
easy selection of a separate, isolated target in space, with the
rifle as an extension of the eye.
If gunpowder was known long before it was used for guns,
the same is also true of the use of the lodestone or magnet. Its
use in the compass for lineal navigation had, also, to wait for