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Understanding McLuhan
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08380_Field_TCGG T145.txt
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1996-04-10
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847b
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16 lines
The twentieth century encounter between alphabetic and
electronic faces of culture confers on the printed word a crucial
role in staying the return to the Africa within.
* The invention of the alphabet, like the invention of the wheel,
was the translation or reduction of a complex, organic interplay
of spaces into a single space. The phonetic alphabet reduced
the use of all the senses at once, which is oral speech, to a
merely visual code. Today, such translation can be effected
back and forth through a variety of spatial forms which we call
the “media of communication.” But each of these spaces has
unique properties and impinges upon our other senses or
spaces in unique ways.
Today, then, it is easy to understand the invention of the
alphabet because, as A. N. Whitehead pointed out in Science