how the blog got its name

We showed this film to an audience and asked them what they had seen, and they said they had seen a chicken, a fowl, and we didn’t know that there was a fowl in it! So we carefully scanned the frames one by one for this fowl, and, sure enough, for about a second, a fowl went over the corner of the frame. … The film was about five minutes long. …

Wilson: We simply asked them: what did you see in the film?

Question: No one gave you a response other than “We saw the chicken”?

Wilson: No, this was the first quick response— “We saw a chicken.”

— from “Film Literacy in Africa”, by John Wilson (Canadian Communications vol.1 no. 4, summer, 1961, pp. 7-14), cited in McLuhan’s “The Gutenberg Galaxy”.

1 comment

  1. I knew the moment I saw the title of your blog that I would like it. I do and I’m bookmarking it for future visits. Cheers!

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