Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08600_Field_TCGG T365.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 953b | 16 lines

The sheer increase in the quantity of information movement
favored the visual organization of knowledge and the rise of
perspective even before typography.

*     As the literal or “the letter” later became identified with
light on rather than light through  the text, there was also the
equivalent stress on “point of view” or the fixed  position of the
reader: “from where I am sitting.” Such a visual stress was
quite impossible before print stepped up the visual intensity of
the written page to the point of entire uniformity and
repeatability. This uniformity and repeatability of typography,
quite alien to manuscript culture, is the necessary preliminary
to unified or pictorial space and “perspective.” Avant-garde
painters like Masaccio in Italy and the Van Eycks in the North
began to experiment with pictorial or perspective space early in
the fifteenth century. And in 1435, a mere decade before