On McLuhan's Mental Mosaic - Hologrammic Prose

"But McLuhan created a more fundamental means to a more organic understanding in the very aphoristic style in which he chose to convey his ideas one consciously embodying the concept that the medium is the message. Its means is not to follow a continuous, linear, and unbroken line of thought, but to create a tessellated pattern of ideas, with each of the tiles in the mental mosaic a particular facet of the overall pattern. Like fractals, an analogue that has gained currency only since McLuhan's last work, the grand, overall pattern is contained in miniature in each of the parts. He also took as models for this style writers in the symbolist and modernist movements, particularly Mallarme, Eliot, Pound, and Joyce."
http://ejournals.library.vanderbilt.edu/ojs/index.php/ameriquests/article/viewFile/83/90

"McLuhan contends that all media--in and of themselves and regardless of the messages they communicate--exert a compelling influence on man and society. Prehistoric, or tribal, man existed in a harmonious balance of the senses, perceiving the world equally through hearing, smell, touch, sight and taste. But technological innovations are extensions of human abilities and senses that alter this sensory balance--an alteration that, in turn, inexorably reshapes the society that created the technology. According to McLuhan, there have been three basic technological innovations: the invention of the phonetic alphabet, which jolted tribal man out of his sensory balance and gave dominance to the eye; the introduction of movable type in the 16th Century, which accelerated this process; and the invention of the telegraph in 1844, which heralded an electronics revolution that will ultimately retribalize man by restoring his sensory balance. McLuhan has made it his business to explain and extrapolate the repercussions of this electronic revolution."--Playboy, http://www.mcluhanmedia.com/m_mcl_inter_pb_01.html