Volume 17, Number 5 · October 7, 1971
TV Guide
By Jonathan Miller
Marshall McLuhan has the peculiar notion that television has very strange properties which set it apart from almost every other medium that human beings have ever used for communication. He holds rather para-doxically that television, in spite of its name, is not a visual medium at all but what he calls an audio-tactile medium. This is based on a rather spurious argument of his to the effect that the linear structure of the screen is similar to the movement of the hand feeling a page of Braille, that the electron beam scans the surface of the images which it is transmitting in a manner very similar to the movement of a hand scanning a line of Braille, and that therefore it is a tactile experience.
Feature, 2172 words
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