Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08306_Field_TCGG T71.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 998b | 16 lines

literate men have been since the invention of the phonetic
alphabet. Mere writing, however, has not the peculiar power of
the phonetic technology to detribalize man. Given the phonetic
alphabet with its abstraction of meaning from sound and the
translation of sound into a visual code, and men were at grips
with an experience that transformed them. No pictographic or
ideogrammic or hieroglyphic mode of writing has the
detribalizing power of the phonetic alphabet. No other kind of
writing save the phonetic has ever translated man out of the
possessive world of total interdependence and interrelation
that is the auditory network. From that magical resonating
world of simultaneous relations that is the oral and acoustic
space there is only one route to the freedom and independence
of detribalized man. That route is via the phonetic alphabet,
which lands men at once in varying degrees of dualistic
schizophrenia. Here is how Bertrand Russell describes (in his