Mcluhan the Passage in Question,

Mcluhan

The passage in question, taken from Marshall McLuhan's the Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, is part of a comprehensive study on the fields of print culture and its general effect on cultural studies. McLuhan's premises is that the advent of communication technology, including alphabetic writing, the printing press and all forms of electronic media, has had profound affects on individual's cognitive organization. This affect in turn has had to profound ramifications as to society and its organization. In essence, McLuhan argues that communicative technology has taken our internal senses and externalized them, saying:

"If a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new rations among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense rations alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent."

McLuhan's argument and conclusion is that the invention of movable type greatly accelerated, intensified and ultimately enabled cultural and cognitive changes that had already been taken place sine the invention and use of the alphabet, thus placing the visual over the oral in terms of cultural predominance. The result is that new technologies, such as the Gutenberg Press, exert a gravitational effect on cognition which thus effects social habits, which in turn affects social interactions.

Overall, I enjoyed this text and found it highly rational and, at the very minimum, interesting. His argument that technology effects social habits and thus, social interactions seems well supported and therefore, valid. His general theory that if it was not for this effect of technology, then there would not be such individual institutions as democracy and capitalism may seem like an enormous hypothesis to claim, but, prior to such technology individuals relied on each other more in order to survive. Technology essentially creates a simpler life, which means there is less dependence on other individuals. With less dependence on others, more dependence is placed on the individual, which in turn may unravel the threads that hold together a society. Thus, the result is individual-focused forms of community governance, such as democracy and capitalism.