Difficulty of access does not always confer adequacy of perception

Vagablogging :: Rolf Potts Vagabonding Blog

“To lament that the packaged tour, like the photograph, cheapens and degrades by making all places easy of access, is to miss most of the game. It is to make value judgments with fixed reference to the fragmentary perspective of literary culture. It is the same position that considers a literary landscape as superior to a movie travelogue. For the untrained awareness, all reading and all movies, like all travel, are equally banal and unnourishing as experience. Difficulty of access does not confer adequacy of perception, though it may involve an object in an aura of pseudo-values, as with a gem, a movie star, or an old master.”

–Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)

Original article can be found here: Difficulty of access does not always confer adequacy of perception