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Understanding McLuhan
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Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso
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08589_Field_TCGG T354.txt
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1996-04-10
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913b
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whether crude or stupid, a man of strong visual bias in his
entire culture, a bias derived from only one source, the phonetic
alphabet. It is the concern of this book to discover how far the
visual bias of this phonetic culture was pushed, first by the
manuscript, and then by typography, or “this mechanical kind
of writing,” as it was early called. Scholastic philosophy was
deeply oral in its procedures and organization, but so, in
different ways, was scriptural exegesis. And the centuries of
study of the Bible in the Middle Ages that embraced both
ancient grammatica (or literature) also prepared the materials
indispensable to scholastic dialectic techniques. Both
grammatica and dialectica or scholastic philosophy were
extremely oral in their orientation compared to the new visual
orientation fostered by print.
A favorite nineteenth century theme was that the