sorry in advance for teh long cut&paste…but have a look,i think you’ll find it worthwhile:

here’s a ‘Prologue’ excerpt
from the Google Book Search above:

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“The Gutenberg Galaxy develops a mosaic or field approach to its problems. Such a mosaic
image of numerous data and quotations in evidence offers the only practical means of revealing causal operations in history.

The alternative procedure would be to offer a series of views of fixed relationships in a pictorial space.
Thus the galaxy or constellation of events upon which the present study concentrates is iteself a mosaic of perpetually interacting forms that have undergone kaleidoscopic transformation – particularly in our own time.
(Note that McLuhan is wrinting this in 1967.)

There might have been some advantage in substituting for the word”galaxy” the word “environment”. Any technology tends to create a new human environment. Script and papyrus created the social environment we think of in connection with the empires of the ancient world.The stirrup and the wheel created unique environments of enormous scope. Technological environments are not merely passive containers of people,but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike. In our time,the sudden shift from the mechanical technology of the wheel to the technology of electronic circuitry represents one of the major shifts of all historical time. Printing from moveable types created quite an unexpected new environment – it created the PUBLIC.

Manuscript technology did not have the intensity or power of extension necessary to create publics on a national scale.

What we have called “nations” in recent centuries did not, and could not,precede the advent of Gutenberg technology any more than they can survive the advent of electric circuitry with its power of totally involving all people in all other people.”

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The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man -
partial preview at here @ Google Book Search:

http://tinyurl.com/5fuvj7

i remember it being a tough slog
the first time through.

not so much of a
“view from another planet” now.