Essential McLuhan 276 tongue. Quite different sentiments are felt by preliterate or semiliterate people.—1960 In fact, the discovery of movable type was the ancestor of all assembly lines and it would be foolish to overlook the impact of the technological form involved in print on the psychological life of readers. To overlook this would be as unrealistic as to ignore rhythm and tempo in music.— 1964 School and classroom as we know them were the direct extension of the technology of the printed book. And the printed book was the first teachingmachine, whereas the manuscript had been merely a teaching tool.—1960 Gutenberg made all history simultaneous: the transportable book brought the world of the dead into the space of the gentleman’s library.— 1951 Mechanization of any process is achieved by fragmentation, beginning with the mechanization of writing by movable type.—1964 The ability to see one’s mother tongue in uniform…dress creates in the individual reader a feeling of unity and power that he shares with all other readers of that tongue.—1960 The literate liberal is convinced all real values are private, personal, individual.—1962 Perhaps the most potent of all as an expression of literacy is our system of uniform pricing that penetrates distant markets and speeds the turn-over of commodities.—1964 THE PHOTOGRAPH While environments as such have a strange power to elude perception, the preceding ones acquire an almost nostalgic fascination when surrounded by the new. This is nowhere more evident than in the art of photography with its power to invest all human artifacts with the quality of art. This is no mere power of reproduction but a making-new.—1967 The photograph revolutionized the human image as much as it changed the patterns and spaces of our cities. Indeed, the photograph gave us a push in the direction of the programmed environment.—1966 In the photographic age, fashions have come to be like the collage style in painting.—1964 The first blow against nationalism is struck by the photograph, because it ignores all boundaries. It just annihilates the usual space-pockets created by newsprint. But even though it’s printed in the newspaper, it’s still totally antithetic to the news-story form, because what you see in a photograph is very different from what you read about a given situation in Korea or Cairo or anywhere else. What you see are people. What you read about are Egyptians, Koreans, and so on.—1959 The first market effect of the photo was to give new intensity of presence and conspicuousness to products. The new effect was to relate