020110328 Gutenberg Galaxy Mosaic

when sense ratios change, men change (265)

The theme of this book is not that there is anything good or bad about print but that unconsciousness of the effect of *any* force is a disaster, especially a force that we have made ourselves. (248)

Is it not possible to emancipate ourselves from the subliminal operation of our own technologies? Is not the essence of education civil defense against media fall-out? (246)

And the influence of unexamined assumptions derived from technology leads quite unnecessarily to maximal determinism in human life. Emancipation from that trap is the goal of all education. (247)

"They became what they beheld." Every new technology thus diminishes sense interplay and consciousness, precisely in the new area of novelty where a kind of identification of viewer and object occurs. This somnambulist conforming of beholder to the new form or structures renders those most deeply immersed in a revolution the least aware of its dynamic. (271)

The effect of the phonetic alphabet in translating the audile-tactile world into a visual world, was both in physics and in literature to create the fallacy of "content." (252)

...the increasing separation of the visual faculty from the interplay with the other senses leads to the rejection from consciousness of most of of our experience, and the consequent hypertrophy of the unconscious. (255)

The notion of moving steadily along on single planes of narrative awareness is totally alien to the nature of language and of consciousness. But it is highly consistent with the nature of the printed word. (244)

Not only did Kant not know that number is audile-tactile and infinitely repeatable, but that the visual, in abstraction from the audile-tactile, sets up a world of antinomies and dichotomies of insoluble but irrelevant kind. (251)

Vico conceives the time-structure of history as "not linear, but contrapuntal. It must be traced along a number of lines of development..." For Vico all history is contemporary or simultaneous, a fact given, Joyce would add, by virtue of language itself, the simultaneous storehouse of all experience. (250)

...truth is a ratio between the mind and things, a ratio made by the shaping imagination... (267)

http://www.amazon.com/Gutenberg-Galaxy-Making-Typographic-Man/dp/0802060412

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