Posted on Saturday, 25 February 2012
By an enormous speed-up of assembly line segments, the movie camera rolls up the real world onto a spool, to be unrolled and translated later onto the screen. That the movie re-creates the organic process and movement by pushing the mechanical principle to the point of reversal is a pattern that appears in all human extensions, whatever, as they reach a peak of performance. By speed-up, the airplane rolls up the highway into itself. The road disappears into the plane at take-off, and the plane becomes a missile, a self-contained transportation system. At this point the wheel is reabsorbed into form of a bird or a fish that the plane becomes as it takes to the air. Skin divers need no path or road, and claim that their motion is like that of bird flight; their feet cease to exist as the progressive, sequential movement that is the origin of rotary action of the wheel. Unlike wing or fin, the wheel is lineal and requires road for its completion.
Herbert Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, First MIT Press Edition 1994, page 182