Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08426_Field_TCGG T191.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 901b | 16 lines

visual sense even of words.

     The only concern here is to spot the degree of effect
which the alphabet had on its first users. Lineality and
homogeneity of parts were “discoveries,” or rather changes in
the sense life of the Greeks under the new regime of phonetic
writing. The Greeks expressed these new modes of visual
perception in the arts. The Romans extended lineality and
homogeneity into the civic and military spheres, and into the
world of the arch and of enclosed or visual space. They did not
so much extend the Greek “discoveries” as undergo the same
process of detribalization and visualization. They extended
lineality into an Empire and homogenization into the mass-
processing of citizens, statuary, and books. Today the Roman
would be quite at home in the U.S.A. and the Greek by
comparison would prefer the “backward” and oral cultures of