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Understanding McLuhan
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Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso
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08386_Field_TCGG T151.txt
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1996-04-10
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It is not the avoidance of redundancy that is the key to
the phonetic alphabet and its effects on person and society.
“Redundancy” is a “content” concept, itself a legacy of
alphabetic technology. That is, any phonetic writing is a visual
code for speech. Speech is the “content” of phonetic writing.
But it is not the content of any other kind of writing.
Pictographic and ideographic varieties of writing are Gestalts or
snapshots of various situations, personal or social. In fact, we
can get a good idea of nonalphabetic forms of writing from
modern mathematical equations like E = MC2 or from the
ancient Greek and Roman “figures of rhetoric.” Such equations
or figures have no content but are structures like an individual
melody which evoke their own world. The figures of rhetoric are
postures of the mind, as hyperbole, or irony, or litotes, or
simile, or paranomasia. Picture writing of all kinds is a ballet of
such postures which delights our modern bias towards