Marshall McLuhan, W. Terrence Gordon - Understanding Media_ the Extensions of Man_ Critical Edition-Gingko Press

inefficiency and fragmentation served important social, intellectual, and artistic purposes. By imposing what Mark Zuckerberg disdainfully calls friction on the processes of information production, distribution, and retrieval, the specialization of media networks and devices also imposed order on the welter of information that was suddenly pouring

After three thousand years of specialist explosion and of increasing specialism and alienation in the technological extensions of our bodies, our world has become compressional by dramatic reversal.

Whereas the modernity proceeded by differentiating, fragmenting, and specializing on the model of the machine, the digital age is marked by connection and entanglement. McLuhan opened Understanding Media with observations along these lines. “The restructuring of human work and association was shaped by the technique of fragmentation that is the ess