EL336 McCluhan (91-180)

Page 115:

"With the availability of quantities of manufactured paper, especially after the twelfth century, the growth of bureaucratic and centralist organization of distant areas got under way again." -McCluhan

This relates to one of my arguments for manuscript culture: It unified us and continues to do so today. Initially writing was used for record-keeping in business which can really be broken down to a public relations tactic. In order to run businesses efficiently and keep customers satisfied, people found it necessary to work in some method of documentation to ensure customers were getting what they paid for. Employers also needed writing to keep their business organized and their employees content--without writing there was really no structure to how businesses were run. Then, as writing wove itself into our everyday lives, it unified us again the way oral communications could take days to achieve--sending a letter was much more efficient in the middle ages than sending a messenger by foot. On a global scale, as McCluhan mentions, writing was able to unify countries. Governments could correspond with one another more clearly and again, more quickly than before. As McCluhan points out though, before writing could be effective in communications on a wide scale, paper and writing tools needed to be massed produced and readily available.