Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/09007_Field_TCGG T772.txt

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

production ensures that the problem of “freedom” will
henceforth be paramount in all social and political discussion.
In Library Week, March 17, 1950, the Minneapolis Morning
Tribune , in an editorial entitled “The Right to Read,” quoted a
joint statement by Herbert Hoover and Harry Truman: “We
Americans know that if freedom means anything, it means the
right to think. And the right to think means the right to read—
anything, written anywhere, by any man, at any time.” This is
an impressive statement of consumer doctrine based on the
homogeneity of print. If print is uniform, it should create
uniform rights for writer and reader, publisher and consumer.
The American colonies were first settled by people who had long
had experience of the exactly opposite idea of the meaning of
print. The producer-oriented or ruler-oriented version of the
message of Gutenberg is simply that it is the ruler’s right to
impose uniform patterns of behavior on society. The police