Marshall McLuhan, 1964:

"With the moving of information in printed form, the wheel and the road came into play again after having been in abeyance for a thousand years.  In England, pressure from the press brought about hard-surface roads in the eighteenth century, with all the population and industrial rearrangement that entailed.  Print, or mechanized writing, introduced a separation and extension of human functions unimaginable even in Roman times.  It was only natural, therefore, that greatly increased wheel speeds, both on road and in factory, should be related to the alphabet that had once done a similar job of speed-up and specialization in the ancient world.  Speed, at least in its lower reaches of the mechanical order, aways operates to separate, to extend, and to amplify functions of the body.  Evens specialist learning in higher education proceeds by ignoring interrelationships; for such complex awareness slows down the achieving of expertness."

-Marshall McLuhan (1964:101), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. MIT Press (Fifth Edition) 1997.