A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

As our original book technology has been succeeded by movie and television we have lost book literacy without acquiring visual literacy. So now the principle of natural selection unexpectedly favors the Chinese and Japanese, for example; their pictorial mode of writing, once a great disadvantage in relation to the abstract culture of print, now favors them in a world of visual communication.
“A Historical Guide to the Media” (1955), p 104
Year: 1955
↪ Also at #2523, #2806
Compiled by William Kuhns
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan