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by laotzu 3869 days ago
This idea of Post Linguistic Emergent Concepts is an interesting one which Marshall McLuhan alluded to in his 1964 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. He suggested that the sheer speed of electric processing made the alphabet obsolete and that in order to cope with this drastic speed up in communication we would have to deprecate our slow spoken languages and adopt an entirely new method of communication:

>Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. A ratio of interplay among these extensions of our human functions is now as necessary collectively as it has always been for our private and personal rationality in terms of our private senses or "wits," as they were once called.