Volume 3, Number 1 · August 20, 1964
T V Dinner
By Frank Kermode
Understanding Media
by Marshall McLuhan
McGraw Hill, 359 pp., $7.50
When Mr. McLuhan published The Gutenberg Galaxy a year or so ago he announced the present volume, which is more supplement than sequel. Gutenberg was about the way it is now possible—since we have progressed some distance into a new era in which the major cultural determinants are electric and electronic technologies—to see how totally life and thought were formerly determined by typographical technologies. Thus we assumed without question that space was uniform and continuous, time linear and successive. We apprehended history, and everything else, visually. Many consequences flowed inevitably from this arbitrary, though apparently natural, arrangement: the growth of nation states, modern educational methods, our games, our economics, the mechanical processes which reached their apogee in the assembly line. We had a visual, linear, successive culture. Thus we were very different from tribal man, who is oral and tactile, not visual. And just at the moment when certain predominantly oral-tactile societies (the Chinese, for instance) are moving into a typographic, assembly-line technology, we are being hurried ignorantly into the electric galaxy and reverting to oral and instantaneous modes of understanding, with all their benefits and dangers.
Review, 1286 words
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