Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08688_Field_TCGG T453.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 928b | 16 lines

affecting Renaissance sensibility. But his entire book is a valid
companion for the student of the Gutenberg revolution. He
does note (p. 6) of this period that “it craved the super-human
instead of the supernatural, as witness the paintings of
Michaelangelo; and it took pleasure in the enormous rather
than in the great, as witness the statues of St. John Lateran
with their hysterical gesticulations, and the tomb of Alexander
VII in St. Peter’s.”

     Print as an immediate technological extension of the
human person gave its first age an unprecedented access of
power and vehemence. Visually, print is very much more “high
definition” than manuscript. Print was, that is to say, a very
“hot” medium coming into a world that for thousands of years
had been served by the “cool” medium of script. Thus our own
“roaring twenties” were the first to feel the hot movie medium