Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08745_Field_TCGG T510.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 988b | 16 lines

appears in a letter of Descartes prefacing his Principles of
Philosophy : “. . . it may first of all be run through in its entirety
like a novel, without forcing the attention unduly upon it. . . . It
is only necessary to mark with a pen the places where difficulty
is found, and continue to read without interruption to the end.”

     The instruction of Descartes to his readers is one of the
more explicit recognitions of the change in language and
thought resulting from print. Namely, that there is no more
need, as there had been in oral philosophy, to probe and check
each term. The context will now do. The situation is not unlike
the meeting of two scholars today. When one asks, “How do
you use the term ‘tribal’ in that connection?”, the other can
say, “Read my article on it in the current issue of . . .”
Paradoxically, a close attention to precise nuance of word use
is an oral and not a written trait. For large, general visual