Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08588_Field_TCGG T353.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 1KB | 16 lines

     Moreover, we begin to know what to expect of print
technology in the diminution of oral qualities. And today in the
electronic age we can understand why there should be a great
diminishing of the special qualities of print culture, and a revival
of oral and auditory values in verbal organization. For verbal
organization, whether on the page or in speech, can have a
visual bias such as we associate with the clipped and rapid
speech of highly literate people. Again, verbal organization,
even on the written page can have an oral bias, as in the
scholastic philosophy. The unconscious literary bias of Rashdall
is quite involuntary when he says in The Universities of Europe
in the Middle Ages  (vol. II, p. 37): “The mysteries of logic were
indeed intrinsically better calculated to fascinate the intellect of
the half-civilized barbarian than the elegancies of classical
poetry and oratory.” But Rashdall is right in considering the oral
man to be a barbarian. For technically the “civilized” man is,