Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08702_Field_TCGG T467.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 939b | 16 lines

became privately portable and quick to read. As today, the
insatiable needs of TV have brought down upon us the backlog
of the old movies, so the needs of the new presses could only
be met by the old manuscripts. Moreover, the reading public
was attuned to this earlier culture. Not only were there no
modern writers at first, but they had no public ready to accept
them so Febvre and Martin say (p. 420): “Thus print facilitated
the work of scholars in some fields, but on the whole one can
say that it contributed nothing to hasten the adoption of
theories or new knowledge.” (42)

     This, of course, is to consider only the “content” of new
theories, and to ignore the role of print in providing new models
for such theories, and in processing new publics to accept
them. Looked at merely from the “content” point of view the
achievement of print is modest indeed: “Already in the fifteenth