Word: eye
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Also in the 1920's and 30's research was being done on the relationship between eye-movement patterns and speed of reading. In reading 100 words, the eye makes 100 to 150 stops, called "fixation pauses." Each fixation takes about one-quarter of a second. In moving from one fixation to another, the eye makes a quick jerk which takes only about 15 thousandths of a second. The eye often moves backward toward the beginning of the line to get a clearer view of the material or to reread it. These are called regressions and occur about ten times...
Media, McLuhan insists, are nothing more than extensions of some human faculty. The book, for example, is an extension of the eye. The telephone is an extension of the ear. Each society utilizes a number of different media, but emphasizes some more than others. Naturally when one medium dominates the rest, the human faculty of which it is an extension becomes more important than all the others...
...several centuries after Gutenburg's invention of movable type, Western society was tyrannized by the printed word, the book, and therefore the eye. For the book-oriented man, the relevant question is not whether he sees beyond his nose, but whether he knows beyond what he sees. We have been trained by our books to look, not to listen or to feel. And seeing imposes a very different perspective from hearing or touching. The eye can only move in straight lines, taking in one word or one idea at a time. The railroad, like the eye, moves in a direct...
...book was responsible for all the mechanical labor-saving devices of the industrial revolution. Protestantism, the Enlightenment and suburbia all owe their creation to the book and the eye. But in spite of its once-impressive power, the book has been overwhelmed, in recent decades, by the electronic media: the telegraph, the radio, the computer, and especially television...
...joint effort of McLuhan and an artist named Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage is unlike anything ever published before. While everyone else continues to write obsolete eye-oriented books, McLuhan has put out the first electronic book. It does not progress in an orderly, sequential manner, developing from an introduction through the main argument and on to the conclusion. Like a television commercial, it is designed to make an impact rather than to tell a story, and because of the extraordinary visual skill with which it was compiled, it succeeds magnificently...