MIKE McMANUS: You say, too, that between today's child who has been raised electronically — and who must still live in a literate world, because we are still in a literate world — that there's a 2400-year gap between that boy or girl and his parents...
McLUHAN: And his parents, who grew up in a literate society. Well, the alphabet, the phonetic alphabet, the beginnings of western literacy, came in about 500 B.C. And since then, between then and now is approximately 2400 or 2500 years. And we are the first post-literate generation, as it were. We have by-passed the literate world of hardware and the lineal left hemisphere technology. We have by-passed it by moving once more, again, into the altogether world, the holistic world, of the right hemisphere people, who are the third-world people. So what is happening to our own children is we're watching them become third-world.