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Understanding McLuhan
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Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso
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07260_Field_TCUM T825.txt
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1996-04-10
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have men understood the psychic mechanisms involved in
invention and technology. Today it is the instant speed of
electric information that, for the first time, permits easy
recognition of the patterns and the formal contours of change
and development. The entire world, past and present, now
reveals itself to us like a growing plant in an enormously
accelerated movie. Electric speed is synonymous with light and
with the understanding of causes. So, with the use of electricity
in previously mechanized situations, men easily discover causal
connections and patterns that were quite unobservable at the
slower rates of mechanical change. If we play backward the
long development of literacy and printing and their effects on
social experience and organization, we can easily see how these
forms brought about that high degree of social uniformity and
homogeneity of society that is indispensable for mechanical
industry. Play them backward, and we get just that shock of