Status Updates From The Gutenberg Galaxy: The M...

"We are guilty of an anachronism if we imagine the medieval student regarded books as the expression of another man's personality and opinion. He looked upon them as part of that great and total body of knowledge, property of ancient sages. Whatever he read in an old book he would take to be not somebody's assertion but a small piece of knowledge acquired by someone long ago from someone else still more ancient."

"Van Groningen's analysis of the reasons for the Greek obsession with the past, as scientific and as psychological security, helps to explain the natural literary bias of all humanist ages in favour of ruins. For nowhere does the past speak so eloquently to the solitary musings of the scholar as from the midst of ruins. "

"but if we discard Berkeley's theory of vision, according to which we "see" a flat field but "construct" a tactile space, we can perhaps rid art history of its obsession with space and bring other achievements into focus" everything is so connected, I'd just read the first page of Berkeley and then came back to this??? On a book that hadn’t mentioned him before?? Angels everywhere omg peace and love

"This externalization of our senses creates what de Chardin calls the "noosphere" or a technological brain for the world. Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside."

"It is a matter of "rite words in rote order," as Joyce put it. But once more any Western child today grows up in this kind of magical repetitive world as he hears advertisements on radio and TV."

Also slow going. McLuhan is clearly excruciatingly well-read and his writing style is quote-heavy and dense. It jumps around chronologically. He’s not a strict historian. Many fascinating statements about thought, culture, and technology. And what typography and print all did to the medieval mind.