Ideas Marshall McLuhan, 1911-80. Communications theorist, born in Edmonton, Alberta. He credited TV with breaking up the linearity of human lives and thinking, a linearity that had evolved from print culture, from centuries of words set in type set in lines set in pages that followed one another in invariable numerical order. But that's all right. Oral cultures became print cultures after Gutenberg.
Print cultures are now in the process of becoming electronic cultures.
The very way we think is changing. But a mosaic consists of thousands of separate tiles, even if one cannot perceive the fact of their separateness past a certain distance. The Bias of Communication . Scientific American , September 1984, pp. The Extensions of Man .