For the oral man the literal text contains all possible levels of meaning. (p. 126) - Marshall McLuhan

The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.

The point of the matter of speedup by wheel, road and paper is the extension of power in an ever more homogenous and uniform space. This the real potential of the Roman technology was not realized until printing had given road and wheel a much greater speed than that of the Roman vortex. Yet the speedup of the electronic age is as disrupting for literate, lineal, and Western man as the Roman paper routes were for tribal villagers. Our speedup today is not a slow explosion outward from center to margins but an instant implosion and an interfusion of space and functions. Our specialist and fragmented civilization of center-margin structure is suddenly experiencing an instantaneous reassembling of all its mechanized bits into an organic whole. This is the new world of the global village.

Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of communal interdependence. (p. 186)