Editing Marshall McLuhan (section)

==== Movable type ====
McLuhan's episodic history takes the reader from pre-alphabetic, [[Tribe|tribal]] humankind to the [[Electronics|electronic age]]. According to McLuhan, the invention of [[movable type]] greatly accelerated, intensified, and ultimately enabled cultural and cognitive changes that had already been taking place since the invention and implementation of the alphabet, by which McLuhan means [[phonemic orthography]]. (McLuhan is careful to distinguish the phonetic alphabet from [[logographic]] or logogramic writing systems, such as [[Egyptian hieroglyphs]] or [[ideograms]].)

Print culture, ushered in by the advance in printing during the middle of the 15th century when the [[Gutenberg press]] was invented, brought about the cultural predominance of the visual over the aural/oral. Quoting (with approval) an observation on the nature of the printed word from [[William Ivins]]' ''Prints and Visual Communication'', McLuhan remarks:{{sfn|M. McLuhan|1962|pp=124–126}}
<blockquote>In this passage [Ivins] not only notes the ingraining of lineal, sequential habits, but, even more important, points out the visual homogenizing of experience of print culture, and the relegation of auditory and other sensuous complexity to the background.…<p>The technology and social effects of typography incline us to abstain from noting interplay and, as it were, "formal" causality, both in our inner and external lives. Print exists by virtue of the static separation of functions and fosters a mentality that gradually resists any but a separative and compartmentalizing or specialist outlook.</p></blockquote>

The main concept of McLuhan's argument (later elaborated upon in ''[[The Medium Is the Massage]]'') <!-- BOOK TITLE IS MASSAGE NOT MESSAGE DO NOT CHANGE -->is that new technologies (such as alphabets, printing presses, and even speech) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn, affects [[social organization]]: print technology changes our perceptual habits—"visual [[Homogeneity and heterogeneity|homogenizing]] of experience"—which in turn affects social interactions—"fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a…specialist outlook". According to McLuhan, this advance of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the modern period in the Western world: [[individualism]], democracy, [[Protestantism]], [[capitalism]], and [[nationalism]]. For McLuhan, these trends all reverberate with print technology's principle of "segmentation of actions and functions and principle of visual [[Quantification (science)|quantification]]."<ref>McLuhan, Marshall. 1962. ''[[The Gutenberg Galaxy]]''. p. 154.</ref>{{verify source|date=November 2019}}