A McLuhan sourcebook 277 the consumer directly to the product… So that whereas the public had once been spectators of the rich consuming conspicuously, the public now became aware of the ordinary man in the act of consuming.—1957 The photograph has reversed the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.—1964 A picture of a group of persons of any hue whatever is a picture of people, not of “coloured people.”—1964 The photograph as an extension of the visual power has the strange property of being a form of statement without syntax. The woodcuts and engravings that preceded the photo were highly syntactical. So is the movie that succeeded the photograph. The syntax of the engraving was from the hand. The syntax of the movie is from the foot. The movie, physiologically, is the union of the eye and the foot.—1964 Photography has been one of the major means that compelled men to examine their environments critically.—1967 Nobody can commit photography alone. It is possible to have at least the illusion of reading and writing in isolation, but photography does not foster such attitudes.—1964 It was the photograph that revealed the secret of bird-flight and enabled man to take off. The photo, in arresting bird-flight, showed that it was based on a principle of wing fixity. Wing movement was seen to be for propulsion, not for flight.—1964 Just as the painter Samuel Morse had unintentionally projected himself into the nonvisual world of the telegraph, so the photograph really transcends the pictorial by capturing the inner gestures and postures of both body and mind, yielding the new worlds of endocrinology and psychopathology. —1964 THE TELEGRAPH The telegraph…is not the mechanization of writing but the electrification of writing.—1960 The telegraph made possible a daily, hourly snap or cross-section of the globe. It killed the 19th-century editorial and the feature writer, who used to shake governments and mount diplomats. The original telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington promoted chess games between experts in the two cities. Other lines were used for lotteries and play in general, just as early radio existed in isolation from any commercial commitments and was, in fact, fostered by the amateur hams for years before it was seized by big interests.—1964 The telegraph had already created new forms of the printed word, in the newspaper and in poetry alike. By making it possible for information to be gathered simultaneously from every quarter of the globe, the telegraph press took on a mosaic and essentially acoustic character of simultaneity that occurred in symbolist poetry as well.—1974