Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08375_Field_TCGG T140.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 944b | 16 lines

detribalizing of the individual has, in the past at least,
depended on an intense visual life fostered by literacy, and by
literacy of the alphabetic kind alone. For alphabetic writing is
not only unique but late. There had been much writing before it.
In fact, any people that ceases to be nomadic and pursues
sedentary modes of work is ready to invent writing. No merely
nomadic people ever had writing any more than they ever
developed architecture or “enclosed space.” For writing is a
visual enclosure of non-visual spaces and senses. It is,
therefore, an abstraction of the visual from the ordinary sense
interplay. And whereas speech is an outering (utterance) of all
of our senses at once, writing abstracts from speech.

     At the present time it is easier to grasp this specific
technology of writing. The new institutes for teaching speeded-
up reading habits work on the separation of eye movements