Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, chapters 12-22 and chapters 22-33:One of McLuhan's running themes is the difference between tribal and literate societies. I have been tracking this thread ...
- "Literacy creates very much simpler kinds of people than those that develop in the complex web of ordinary tribal and oral societies. For the fragmented man creates the homogenized Western world, while oral societies are made up of people differentiated, not by their specialist skills or visible marks, but by their unique emotional mixes. The oral man's inner world is a tangle of complex emotions and feelings that the Western practical man has long ago eroded or suppressed within himself in the interest of efficiency and practicality" (75).
