Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08376_Field_TCGG T141.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 914b | 16 lines

from inner verbalization. It will be indicated later that all reading
in the ancient and medieval worlds was reading aloud. With
print the eye speeded up and the voice quieted down. But inner
verbalizing was taken for granted as inseparable from the
horizontal following of the words on the page. Today we know
that the divorce of reading and verbalizing can be made by
vertical reading. This, of course, pushes the alphabetic
technology of the separation of the senses to an extreme of
inanity, but it is relevant to an understanding of how writing of
any sort gets started.

     In a paper entitled “A History of the Theory of
Information,” read to the Royal Society in 1951, E. Colin Cherry
of the University of London, observed that “Early invention was
greatly hampered by an inability to dissociate mechanical
structure from animal form. The invention of the wheel was one