McLuhan and the Intellectual

So grumpymutt and I were discussing a few passages in the McLuhan piece, starting at the top of page 17. "If the criminal appears as a nonconformist who is unable to meet the demand of technology that we behave in uniform and continuous patterns, literate man is quite inclined to see others who cannot conform as somewhat pathetic. Especially the child, the cripple, the woman, and the colored person appear in a world of visual and typographic technology as victims of injustice." I assume that he's using "pathetic" here in terms of having pity for something in a sort of compassionate way, which is the way he uses it in the paragraph above. He makes references to the fact that we're losing the ability to assign guilt because we see criminals who cannot comform as pathetic. Ok so I'm not done with this part yet, but we were trying to relate all of this to the bottom of page 36, the top of page 37. "As electric information levels rise, almost any kind of material will serve any need or function, forcing the intellectual more and more into the role of social command and into the service of production." I guess I'm just having trouble unpacking these two parts. There seems to be some sort of idea about the role of the literate person and the intellectual in comparison to the rest of society...and how the role of the literate intellectual is changing in the new electric age, but I'm just having some problems piecing all this together.