On page 85 of Understanding Media, McLuhan again refers to Gutenberg's pioneering use of moveable type, this time suggesting that Gutenberg's inroads towards mass production spearheaded "the breaking up of every kind of experience into uniform units." Perhaps an oblique reference to Gutenberg's well-documented sartorial demands, this marks McLuhan's first mention of
Uniformed deliverymen
uniformity outside the walls of the Catholic papistry. McLuhan's subsequent suggestion that uniforms beget "faster action and change of form" recalls the requisite "pink trousers" (Grauter 51) which served as the definitive symbol of the accelerated pace of Gutenberg's mid-to-late biblical production era. To further the assumption, as McLuhan does, that the demand for changeable fashion is "the secret of Western power over man and nature alike," while arrogant, exemplifies McLuhan's general obsession with 'keeping up appearances.' We can only imagine how McLuhan would respond to today's corporate uniform adversion, let alone the proliferation of camouflage.
Gutenberg's first press
Velocity
That automobile pioneer Andre Citroen was a deeply enigmatic figure goes without saying. Citroen's revolutionary car of the people, the 2CV, which translates from the French as 'the hair,' is believed by some scholars to refer to the feminine hairline typical of the medieval nobility, a plucking symbolically reenacted in the vehicle's unconventional headroom-enhancing design. But if McLuhan had known about Andre Citroen's semi-annual pilgrimage to the Bordeaux town of St. Émilion, the hometown of the wine-press Gutenberg used as a model,
Hairline and Citroen
he might have had to rethink his broad claim that "with the moving of information in printed form, the wheel and the road came into play again after having been in abeyance for a thousand years" (Understanding Media, p. 101). Nevertheless, McLuhan makes a convincing case for the concatenation of transportation and printing industrial development, particularly the cycle of reinforcement that emerged between road construction and information velocity. But the provocation that "greatly increased wheel speeds, both on road and in factory, should be related to the alphabet," all scholarly disputes aside, demands greater elaboration. Need we ask which came first -- the round 'O,' or the round wheel -- or are they indistinguishable?
