Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08832_Field_TCGG T597.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 1KB | 16 lines

     “Strike flat the thick rotundity of the world,” cries Lear as
a curse to snap “the most precious square of sense.” And the
striking flat, the isolation of the visual is the great achievement
of Gutenberg and the Mercator projection. And Dantzig (p.
125) notes: “Thus the alleged properties of the straight line are
of the geometer’s own making. He deliberately disregards
thickness and breadth, deliberately assumes that the thing
common to two such lines, their point of intersection, is
deprived of all dimension . . . but the assumptions themselves
are arbitrary, a convenient fiction at best.” It is easy for
Dantzig to see how fictional classical geometry was. It got huge
nourishment from printing after being engendered by the
alphabet. And the non-Euclidean geometries familiar to our
time also depend on electric technology for their nutriment and
plausibility, and this is no more seen by mathematicians now
than the relations to alphabet and print were seen by