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The Gutenbery Galaxy

Book by Marshall McLuhan · 3 quotes · Printing Press, Culture, Feminism

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The Gutenbery Galaxy Quotes

“Pictorial advertisements and movies finally did for women what print technology had done for men centuries before. When raising these themes, one is beset by queries of the "Was it a good thing?" variety. Such questions seem to mean: "How should we feel about these matters?" They never suggest that anything could be done about them. Surely, understanding the formal dynamic or configuration of such events is the prime concern. That is really doing something. Control and action in terms of values must follow understanding. Value judgments have long been allowed to create a moral fog around technological change such as renders understanding impossible.”

“An age in rapid transition is one which exists on the frontier between two cultures and between conflicting technologies. Every moment of its consciousness is an act of translation of each of these cultures into the other. Today we live on the frontier between five centuries of mechanism and the new electronics, between the homogeneous and the simultaneous. It is painful but fruitful. The sixteenth century Renaissance was an age on the frontier between two thousand years of alphabetic and manuscript culture, on the one hand, and the new mechanism of repeatability and quantification, on the other.”