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I Am A Christian According To My Conscience In Belief,in Purpose And Wish;mnot Of Course By The Orthodox Standard. But I Am Content, And Have A Feeling Of Trust And Safety. The Machiavellian Mind And The Merchant Mind Are At One In Their Simple Faith In The Power Of Segmental Division To Rule All--in The Dichotomy Of Power And Morals And Of Money And Morals.

-Marshall McLuhan

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I Am A Christian

Marshall McLuhan

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I Am A Christian According To My Conscience In Belief,in Purpose And Wish;mnot Of Course By The Orthodox Standard. But I Am Content, And Have A Feeling Of Trust And Safety. The Machiavellian Mind And The Merchant Mind Are At One In Their Simple Faith In The Power Of Segmental Division To Rule All--in The Dichotomy Of Power And Morals And Of Money And Morals.

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The Future Of Work Consists Of Learning A Living.

When Things Come At You Very Fast, Naturally You Lose Touch With Yourself.

New Media May At First Appear As Mere Codes Of Transmission For Older Achievement And Established Patterns Of Thought. But Nobody Could Make The Mistake Of Supposing That Phonetic Writing Merely Made It Possible For The Greeks To Set Down In Visual Order What They Had Though And Known Before Writing. In The Same Way Printing Made Literature Possible. It Did Not Merely Encode Literature.

American Youth Attributes Much More Importance To Arriving At Driver's License Age Than At Voting Age.

When People Become Too Intense, Too Serious, They Will Have Trouble In Relating To Any Sort Of Social Game Or Norm. Perhaps This Is Why Jokes Are So Important. On One Hand They Tell Us About Where The Problems And Grievances Are, And, At The Same Time, They Provide The Means Of Enduring These Grievances By Laughing At The Problems.

Innumerable Confusions And A Feeling Of Despair Invariably Emerge In Periods Of Great Technological And Cultural Transition.

We Don't Know Who Discovered Water, But We Know It Wasn't The Fish.

Education In A Technological World Of Replaceable And Expendable Parts Is Neuter.

The Scientist Rigorously Defends His Right To Be Ignorant Of Almost Everything Except His Specialty.

Our Technology Forces Us To Live Mythically, But We Continue To Think Fragmentarily, And On Single, Separate Planes.

The Future Masters Of Technology Will Have To Be Light-hearted And Intelligent. The Machine Easily Masters The Grim And The Dumb.

My Main Theme Is The Extension Of The Nervous System In The Electric Age, And Thus, The Complete Break With Five Thousand Years Of Mechanical Technology. This I State Over And Over Again. I Do Not Say Whether It Is A Good Or Bad Thing. To Do So Would Be Meaningless And Arrogant.

We Impose The Form Of The Old On The Content Of The New.

Such Is The Content Of The Mental Life Of The Hemingway Hero And The Good Guy In General. Every Day He Gets Beaten Into A Servile Pulp By His Own Mechanical Reflexes, Which Are Constantly Busy Registering And Reacting To The Violent Stimuli Which His Big, Noisy, Kinesthetic Environment Has Provided For His Unreflective Reception.

The Artist Is A Person Who Is Expert In The Training Of Perception.

Faced With Information Overload, We Have No Alternative But Pattern-recognition.

The Movie, By Sheer Speeding Up Of The Mechanical, Carried Us From The World Of Sequence And Connections Into The World Of Creative Configurations And Structure.

It Is The Framework Which Changes With Each New Technology And Not Just The Picture Within The Frame.

The Visual Power Of The Phonetic Alphabet Is The Translate Other Languages Into Itself Is Part Of Its Power To Invade Right Hemisphere (oral) Cultures.

The Age Of Automation Is Going To Be The Age Of "do It Yourself".

Characteristics

Since With Electricity We Extend Our Central Nervous System Globally, Instantly Interrelating Every Human Experience.

Human Experience

The Global Village Is A Place Of Very Arduous Interfaces And Very Abrasive Situations.

Mysticism Is Just Tomorrow's Science Dreamed Today.

Environments Are Not Just Containers, But Are Processes That Change The Content Totally.

Language Does For Intelligence What The Wheel Does For The Feet And The Body. It Enables Them To Move From Thing To Thing With Greater Ease And Speed And Ever Less Involvement.

Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce Specifies The Tower Of Babel As The Tower Of Sleep, That Is, The Tower Of The Witless Assumption, Or What Bacon Calls The Reign Of The Idols.

The New Media Are Not Ways Of Relating To Us The 'real' World; They Are The Real World And They Reshape What Remains Of The Old World At Will.

I Don't Want Them To Believe Me, I Just Want Them To Think.

Our Electrically-configured World Has Forced Us To Move From The Habit Of Data Classification To The Mode Of Pattern Recognition. We Can No Longer Build Serially, Block-by-block, Step-by-step, Because Instant Communication Insures That All Factors Of The Environment And Of Experience Co-exist In A State Of Active Interplay.

The Method Of Our Time Is To Use Not A Single But Multiple Models For Exploration.

Anything That's Popular Is A Rear-view Image.

Current Illusion Is That Science Has Abolished All Natural Laws.

For Those For Whom The Sex Act Has Come To Seem Mechanical And Merely The Meeting And Manipulation Of Body Parts, There Often Remains A Hunger Which Can Be Called Metaphysical But Which Is Not Recognized As Such, And Which Seeks Satisfaction In Physical Danger, Or Sometimes In Torture, Suicide, Or Murder.

The New Is Always Made Up Of The Old, Or Rather, What People See In The New Is Always The Old Thing. The Rear-view Mirror. The Future Of The Future Is The Present, And This Is Something That People Are Terrified Of.

There Is No More Great Men; There Is Only Great Committees.

The Percept Takes Priority Of The Concept.

Professionalism Is Environmental. Amateurism Is Anti Environmental. Professionalism Merges The Individual Into Patterns Of Total Environment. Amateurism Seeks The Development Of The Total Awareness Of The Individual And The Critical Awareness Of The Ground Rules Of Society. The Amateur Can Afford To Loose.

I Am Not A "culture Critic" Because I Am Not In Any Way Interested In Classifying Cultural Forms. I Am A Metaphysician, Interested In The Life Of The Forms And Their Surprising Modalities. That Is Why I Have No Interest In The Academic World.

The Price Of Eternal Vigilance Is Indifference.

The Tv Camera Has No Shutter. It Does Not Deal With Aspects Or Facets Of Objects In High Resolution. It Is A Means Of Direct Pick-up By The Electrical Groping Over Surfaces.

The New Media Are Not Bridges Between Man And Nature - They Are Nature...

Ours Is A Brand-new World Of Allatonceness [all-at-once-ness]. 'time' Has Ceased, 'space' Has Vanished. We Now Live In A Global Village ... A Simultaneous Happening. ... The New Electronic Interdependence Recreates The World In The Image Of A Global Village.

We Become What We Behold. We Shape Our Tools And Then Our Tools Shape Us.

To Say That "the Camera Cannot Lie" Is Merely To Underline The Multiple Deceits That Are Now Practised In Its Name.

Historians And Archaeologists Will One Day Discover That The Ads Of Our Time Are The Richest And Most Faithful Reflections That Any Society Ever Made Of Its Entire Range Of Activities.

Language Always Preserves A Play Or Figure/ground Relation Between Experience, And Perception And Its Replay In Expression.

Affluence Creates Poverty.

If The Nineteenth Century Was The Age Of The Editorial Chair, Ours Is The Century Of The Psychiatrist's Couch.

Once We Have Surrendered Our Senses And Nervous Systems To The Private Manipulation Of Those Who Would Try To Benefit From Taking A Lease On Our Eyes And Ears And Nerves, We Don't Really Have Any Rights Left. Leasing Our Eyes And Ears And Nerves To Commercial Interests Is Like Handing Over The Common Speech To A Private Corporation, Or Like Giving The Earth's Atmosphere To A Company As A Monopoly.

The Artist Is The Man In Any Field, Scientific Or Humanistic, Who Grasps The Implications Of His Actions And Of New Knowledge In His Own Time. He Is The Man Of Integral Awareness.

Like Primitive, We Now Live In A Global Village Of Our Own Making, A Simultaneous Happening. It Doesn't Necessarily Mean Harmony And Peace And Quiet But It Does Mean Huge Involvement In Everybody Else's Affairs.

A Light Bulb Creates An Environment By Its Mere Presence.

Why Is It So Easy To Acquire The Solutions Of Past Problems And So Difficult To Solve Current Ones

Photography Turns People Into Things And Their Image Into A Mass Consumer Product.

Good Taste Is The First Refuge Of The Non Creative. It Is The Last Ditch Stand Of The Artist.

Professionalism Merges The Individual Into Patterns Of Total Environment. Amateurism Seeks The Development Of The Total Awareness Of The Individual And The Critical Awareness Of The Groundrules Of Society. The Amateur Can Afford To Lose. The Professional Tends To Classify And Specialise, To Accept Uncritically The Groundrules Of The Environment. The Groundrules Provided By The Mass Response Of His Colleagues Serve As A Pervasive Environment Of Which He Is Contentedly Unaware. The 'expert' Is The Man Who Stays Put.

The Answers Are Always Inside The Problem, Not Outside.

Education, Which Should Be Helping Youth To Understand And Adapt To Their Revolutionary New Environments, Is Instead Being Used Merely As An Instrument Of Cultural Aggression.

The 'content' Of Any Medium Is Always Another Medium.

The Business Of The Advertiser Is To See That We Go About Our Business With Some Magic Spell Or Tune Or Slogan Throbbing Quietly In The Background Of Our Minds.

The Car Has Become An Article Of Dress Without Which We Feel Uncertain, Unclad, And Incomplete In The Urban Compound.

Everybody At The Speed Of Light Tends To Become A Nobody.

The Young Today Cannot Follow Narrative But They Are Alert To Drama. They Cannot Bear Description But They Love Landscape And Action.

Today's Child Is Bewildered When He Enters The 19th Century Environment That Still Characterizes The Educational Establishment Where Information Is Scarce But Ordered And Structured By Fragmented, Classified Patterns Subjects, And Schedules.

The Bible Belt Is Oral Territory And Therefore Despised By The Literati.

The Successor To Politics Will Be Propaganda. Propaganda, Not In The Sense Of A Message Or Ideology, But As The Impact Of The Whole Technology Of The Times.

Once You See The Boundaries Of Your Environment, They Are No Longer The Boundaries Of Your Environment.

In Experimental Art, Men Are Given The Exact Specifications Of Coming Violence To Their Own Psyches From Their Own Counter-irritant Or Technology... But The Counter-irritant Usually Proves A Greater Plague Than The Initial Irritant, Like A Drug Habit.

All Media Are Extensions Of Some Human Faculty- Psychic Or Physical.

All The New Media Are Art Forms Which Have The Power Of Imposing, Like Poetry, Their Own Assumptions.

...the Logic Of The Photograph Is Neither Verbal Nor Syntactical, A Condition Which Renders Literary Culture Quite Helpless To Cope With The Photograph.

What Is Very Little Understood About The Electronic Age Is That It Angelizes Man, Disembodies Him. Turns Him Into Software.

It Is Perhaps Typical Of Very Creative Minds That They Hit Very Large Nails Not Quite On The Head.

Only The Vanquished Remember History.

Interface, Of The Resonant Interval As 'where The Action Is', Whether Chemical, Psychic Or Social, Involves Touch.

Some Of My Fellow Academics Are Very Hostile, But I Sympathize With Them. They've Been Asleep For 500 Years And They Don't Like Anybody Who Comes Along And Stirs Them Up.

I Am Resolutely Opposed To All Innovation, All Change, But I Am Determined To Understand What’s Happening. Because I Don’t Choose Just To Sit And Let The Juggernaut Roll Over Me. Many People Seem To Think That If You Talk About Something Recent, You’re In Favor Of It. The Exact Opposite Is True In My Case. Anything I Talk About Is Almost Certainly Something I’m Resolutely Against. And It Seems To Me The Best Way To Oppose It Is To Understand It. And Then You Know Where To Turn Off The Buttons.

The Tv Generation Is Postliterate And Retribalized. It Seeks By Violence To Scrub The Old Private Image And To Merge In A New Tribal Identity, Like Any Corporate Executive.

Human Perception Is Literally Incarnation.

The Printing Press Was At First Mistaken For An Engine Of Immortality By Everybody Except Shakespeare.

In Television, Images Are Projected At You. You Are The Screen. The Images Wrap Around You. You Are The Vanishing Point.

Phenomenology Is Dialectic In Ear-mode - A Massive And Decentralized Quest For Roots, For Ground.

Radio Affects Most Intimately, Person-to-person, Offering A World Of Unspoken Communication Between Writer-speaker And The Listener.

Time’ Has Ceased, 'space' Has Vanished. We Now Live In A Global Village... A Simultaneous Happening

Einstein Pronounced The Doom Of Continuous Or 'rational' Space, And The Way Was Made Clear For Picasso And The Marx Brothers And Mad Magazine.

A Successful Book Cannot Afford To Be More Than Ten Percent New.

Only The Small Secrets Need To Be Protected. The Large Ones Are Kept Secret By Public Incredulity.

All Media Work Us Over Completely.

Cultural Change

Tv Acting Is So Extremely Intimate, Because Of The Peculiar Involvement Of The Viewer With The Completion Or "closing" Of The Tv Image, That The Actor Must Achieve A Great Degree Of Spontaneous Casualness That Would Be Irrelevant In Movie And Lost On The Stage. For The Audience Participates In The Inner Life Of The Tv Actor As Fully As In The Outer Life Of The Movie Star. Technically, Tv Tends To Be A Close-up Medium. The Close-up That In The Movie Is Used For Shock Is, On Tv, A Quite Casual Thing.

The Story Begins Only When The Book Closes.

You Can Be A French Canadian Or An English Canadian, But Not A Canadian. We Know How To Live Without An Identity, And This Is One Of Our Marvellous Resources.

The Tribalizing Power Of The New Electronic Media, The Way In Which They Return To Us To The Unified Fields Of The Old Oral Cultures, To Tribal Cohesion And Pre-individualist Patterns Of Thought, Is Little Understood. Tribalism Is The Sense Of The Deep Bond Of Family, The Closed Society As The Norm Of Community.

Today's Child Is Growing Up Absurd, Because He Lives In Two Worlds, And Neither Of Them Inclines Him To Grow Up. Growing Up--thatis Our New Work, And It Is Total. Mere Instruction Will Not Suffice.

If We Understand The Revolutionary Transformations Caused By New Media, We Can Anticipate And Control Them; But If We Continue In Our Self-induced Subliminal Trance, We Will Be Their Slaves.

I Do Not Explain, I Explore.

All Media Work Us Over Completely. They Are So Pervasive In Their Personal, Political, Economic, Aesthetic, Psychological, Moral, Ethical, And Social Consequences That They Leave No Part Of Us Untouched, Unaffected, Unaltered. The Medium Is The Message. Any Understanding Of Social And Cultural Change Is Impossible Without A Knowledge Of The Way Media Work As Environments. All Media Are Extensions Of Some Human Faculty - Psychic Or Physical.

One Thing About Which Fish Know Exactly Nothing Is Water, Since They Have No Anti-environment Which Would Enable Them To Perceive The Element They Live In.

Obsolescence Is The Moment Of Superabundance.

One Of The Effects Of Living With Electric Information Is That We Live Habitually In A State Of Information Overload. There's Always More Than You Can Cope With.

A Typewriter Is A Means Of Transcribing Thought, Not Expressing It.

The Mother Tongue Is Propaganda.

Food For The Mind Is Like Food For The Body: The Inputs Are Never The Same As The Outputs.

Those Conspiracies That Are Too Incredible To Be Believed, Are By The Same Right, Those Which Most Often Succeed.

Our Permanent Address Is Tommorrow.

It Is Always The Psychic And Social Grounds, Brought Into Play By Each Medium Or Technology, That Readjust The Balance Of The Hemispheres And Of Human Sensibilities Into Equilibrium With Those Grounds.

The Winner Is One Who Knows When To Drop Out In Order To Get In Touch.

Scribal Culture And Gothic Architecture Were Both Concerned With Light Through, Not Light On.

Today The Tyrant Rules Not By Club Or Fist, But Disguised As A Market Researcher, He Shepherds His Flocks In The Ways Of Utility And Comfort.

Language Is A Form Of Organized Stutter.

It's Misleading To Suppose There's Any Basic Difference Between Education & Entertainment. This Distinction Merely Relieves People Of The Responsibility Of Looking Into The Matter.

A Point Of View Can Be A Dangerous Luxury When Substituted For Insight And Understanding.

In An Age Of Multiple And Massive Innovations, Obsolescence Becomes The Major Obsession.

Electricity Does Not Centralize, But Decentralizes.

When Producers Want To Know What The Public Wants, They Graph It As Curves. When They Want To Tell The Public What To Get, They Say It In Curves.

The Public Has Yet To See Tv As Tv. Broadcasters Have No Awareness Of Its Potential. The Movie People Are Just Beginning To Get A Grasp On Film.

For The Satiated, Both Sex And Speed Are Pretty Boring Until The Element Of Danger And Even Death Is Introduced.

Any Ad Consciously Attended To Is Comical. Ads Are Not Meant For Conscious Consumption. They Are Intended As Subliminal Pills For The Subconsious In Order To Exercise An Hypnotic Spell, Especially On Sociologists.

The Literate Man Is A Sucker For Propaganda...you Cannot Propagandize A Native. You Can Sell Him Rum And Trinkets, But You Cannot Sell Him Ideas.

Don't Ask Whether It Is Right Or Wrong. Instead Try To Find Out What Is Going On.

Pornography And Obscenity...work By Specialism And Fragmentation. They Deal With A Figure Without A Ground - Situations In Which The Human Factor Is Suppressed In Favor Of Sensations And Kicks.

Typographic Man Can Express But Is Helpless To Read The Configurations Of Print Technology.

Advertising Is The Greatest Art Form Of The 20th Century.

Typography Tended To Alter Language From A Means Of Perception And Exploration To A Portable Commodity.

It Is The Weak And Confused Who Worship The Pseudosimplicities Of Brutal Directness.

The Ignorance Of How To Use Knowledge Stockpiles Exponentially.

When Two Seemingly Disparate Elements Are Imaginatively Poised Put In Apposition In New And Unique Ways, Startling Discoveries Often Result.

The Movie Stars And Matinee Idols Are Put Into The Public Domain By Photography. They Become Dreams That Money Can Buy. They Can Be Bought And Thumbed More Easily Than Public Prostitutes.

As The Unity Of The Modern World Becomes Increasingly A Technological Rather Than A Social Affair, The Techniques Of The Arts Provide The Most Valuable Means Of Insight Into The Real Direction Of Our Own Collective Purposes.

The Meaning Of Experience Is Typically One Generation Behind The Experience. The Content Of New Situations, Both Private And Corporate, Is Typically The Preceding Situation.

All Discoveries In Art And Science Result From An Accumulation Of Errors.

The Wheel Is An Extension Of The Foot, The Book Is An Extension Of The Eye, Clothing An Extension Of The Skin, Electric Circuitry An Extension Of The Central Nervous System.

Once Introduced Discontinuity, Once Challenge Any Of The Properties Of Visual Space, And As They Flow From Each Other, The Whole Conceptual Framework Collapses.

Every Innovation Scraps Its Immediate Predecessor And Retrieves Still Older Figures – It Causes Floods Of Antiques Or Nostalgic Art Forms And Stimulates The Search For Museum Pieces.

It Is Critical Vision Alone Which Can Mitigate The Unimpeded Operation Of The Automatic.

Metaphor Has Traditionally Been Regarded As The Matrix And Pattern Of The Figures Of Speech.

I've Always Been Careful Never To Predict Anything That Had Not Already Happened.

Poetry And The Arts Can’t Exist In America. Mere Exposure To The Arts Does Nothing For A Mentality Which Is Incorrigibly Dialectical. The Vital Tensions And Nutritive Action Of Ideogram Remain Inaccessible To This State Of Mind.

The Content Or Message Of Any Particular Medium Has About As Much Importance As The Stenciling On The Casing Of An Atomic Bomb.

Character No Longer Is Shaped By Only Two Earnest, Fumbling Experts. Now All The World's A Sage.

Ideally, Advertising Aims At The Goal Of A Programmed Harmony Among All Human Impulses And Aspirations And Endeavors. Using Handicraft Methods, It Stretches Out Toward The Ultimate Electronic Goal Of A Collective Consciousness.

Canadians Are The People Who Learned To Live Without The Bold Accents Of The Natural Ego-trippers Of Other Lands.

Today, The Mass Audience (the Successor To The "public") Can Be Used As A Creative, Participating Force. It Is, Instead, Merely Given Packages Of Passive Entertainment. Politics Offers Yesterday's Answers To Today's Questions.

There Is An Enormous Redundancy In Every Well-written Book. With A Well-written Book I Only Read The Right-hand Page And Allow My Mind To Work On The Left-hand Page. With A Poorly Written Book I Read Every Word.

The Medium, Or Process, Of Our Time - Electric Technology Is Reshaping And Restructuring Patterns Of Social Interdependence And Every Aspect Of Our Personal Life. It Is Forcing Us To Reconsider And Re-evaluate Practically Every Thought, Every Action.

Sentimentality, Like Pornography, Is Fragmented Emotion; A Natural Consequence Of A High Visual Gradient In Any Culture.

Most Of Our Assumptions Have Outlived Their Uselessness.

The Photograph Reverses The Purpose Of Travel, Which Until Now Had Been To Encounter The Strange And Unfamiliar.

The Computer Is The Most Extraordinary Of Man's Technological Clothing; It's An Extension Of Our Central Nervous System. Beside It, The Wheel Is A Mere Hula-hoop.

In A Cool Medium, The Audience Is An Active Constituent Of The Viewing Or Listening Experience. A Girl Wearing Open-mesh Silk Stockings Or Glasses Is Inherently Cool And Sensual Because The Eye Acts As A Surrogate Hand In Filling In The Low-definition Image Thus Engendered. Which Is Why Boys Make Passes At Girls Who Wear Glasses.

Transmitted At The Speed Of Light, All Events On This Planet Are Simultaneous. In The Electric Environment Of Information All Events Are Simultaneous, There Is No Time Or Space Separating Events.

The 'expert' Is The Man Who Stays Put.

The New Media And Technologies By Which We Amplify And Extend Ourselves Constitute Huge Collective Surgery Carried Out On The Social Body With Complete Disregard For Antiseptics.

Any Loss Of Identity Prompts People To Seek Reassurance And Rediscovery Of Themselves By Testing, And Even By Violence. Today, The Electric Revolution, The Wired Planet, And The Information Environment Involve Everybody In Everybody To The Point Of Individual Extinction.

Where The Whole Man Is Involved There Is No Work. Work Begins With The Division Of Labor.

Division Of Labor

The Poet, The Artist, The Sleuth, Whoever Sharpens Our Perception Tends To Antisocial; Rarely 'well Adjusted,' He Cannot Go Along With Currents And Trends.

It Is Possible To Deal With The Entire Environment As A Work Of Art.

Everybody Tends To Merge His Identity With Other People At The Speed Of Light. It's Called Being Mass Man.

Far More Thought And Care Go Into The Composition Of Any Prominent Ad In A Newspaper Or Magazine Than Go Into The Writing Of Their Features And Editorials.

America Is The Only Country Ever Founded On The Printed Word.

Only A Fraction Of The History Of Literacy Has Been Typographic.

Physiologically, Man In The Normal Use Of Technology (or His Variously Extended Body) Is Perpetually Modified By It And In Turn Finds Ever New Ways Of Modifying His Technology. Man Becomes, As It Were, The Sex Organs Of The Machine World, As The Bee Of The Plant World, Enabling It To Fecundate And To Evolve Ever New Forms. The Machine World Reciprocates Man's Love By Expediting His Wishes And Desires, Namely, In Providing Him With Wealth.

The Products Of Modern Science Are Not In Themselves Good Or Bad; It Is The Way They Are Used That Determines Their Value.

Fish Did Not Discover Water.

The Fall Or Scrapping Of A Cultural World Puts Us All Into The Same Archetypal Cesspool, Engendering Nostalgia For Earlier Conditions.

Artists In Various Fields Are Always The First To Discover How To Enable One Medium Or To Release The Power Of Another.

There Is A Real, Living Unity In Our Time, As In Any Other, But It Lies Submerged Under A Superficial Hubbub Of Sensation.

The Task Confronting Contemporary Man Is To Live With The Hidden Ground Of His Activities As Familiarly As Our Literate Predecessors Lived With The Figure Minus Ground.

Today We Are Beginning To Notice That The New Media Are Not Just Mechanical Gimmicks For Creating Worlds Of Illusion, But New Languages With New And Unique Powers Of Expression.

The Past Went That-a-way. When Faced With A Totally New Situation, We Tend Always To Attach Ourselves To The Objects, To The Flavor Of The Most Recent Past. We Look At The Present Through A Rear View Mirror. We March Backwards Into The Future.

The More The Data Banks Record About Each One Of Us, The Less We Exist.

The Circuited City Of The Future Will Not Be The Huge Hunk Of Concentrated Real Estate Created By The Railway. It Will Take On A Totally New Meaning Under Conditions Of Very Rapid Movement. It Will Be An Information Megalopolis.

Information And Images Bump Against Each Other Every Day In Massive Quantities, And The Resonance Of This Interfacing Is Like The Babble Of A Village Or Tavern Gossip Session.

Gramophone And Movies Were Merely The Mechanization Of Speech And Gesture. But The Radio And Tv Were Not Just The Electronification Of Speech And Gesture But The Electronification Of The Entire Range Of Human Personal Expressiveness. With Electronification The Flow Is Taken Out Of The Wire And Into The Vacuum Tube Circuit, Which Confers Freedom And Flexibility Such As Are In Metaphor And In Words Themselves.

The Present Is Always Invisible Because Its Environmental. No Environment Is Perceptible, Simply Because It Saturates The Whole Field Of Attention.

All Media Exist To Invest Our Lives With Artificial Perceptions And Arbitrary Values.

Man Works When He Is Partially Involved. When He Is Totally Involved He Is At Play Or Leisure.

The Modern Little Red Riding Hood, Reared On Singing Commercials, Has No Objection To Being Eaten By The Wolf.

Advertising Business

To Say That A Body Or Its Gravitational Field 'bends In Space' In Its Vicinity Is The Discuss Visual Space In Acoustic Terms.

What We Call Art Would Seem To Be Specialist Artifacts For Enhancing Human Perception.

Ads Push The Principle Of Noise All The Way To The Plateau Of Persuasion. They Are Quite In Accord With The Procedures Of Brainwashing.

As Information Becomes Our Environment, It Becomes Mandatory To Program The Environment Itself As A Work Of Art.

The Space Of Early Greek Cosmology Was Structured By Logos - Resonant Utterance Or Word.

Politics Offers Yesterday's Answers To Today's Problems.

Publication Is A Self-invasion Of Privacy.

The Electric Light Is Pure Information. It Is A Medium Without A Message

Relativity Theory Forced The Abandonment, In Principle, Of Absolute Space And Absolute Time.

Mass Transportation Is Doomed To Failure In North America Because A Person's Car Is The Only Place Where He Can Be Alone And Think.

Media Are Means Of Extending And Enlarging Our Organic Sense Lives Into Our Environment.

When Information Rubs Against Information The Results Are Startling And Effective. The Perrenial Quest For Involvement, Fill-in, Takes Many Forms.

The Spoken Word Was The First Technology By Which Man Was Able To Let Go Of His Environment In Order To Grasp It In A New Way.

The Copy Of An Ad Is Merely A Punning Gag To Distract The Critical Faculties While The Image Of The Product Goes To Work On The Hypnotized Viewer. Those Who Have Spent Their Lives Protesting About 'false And Misleading Ad Copy' Are Godsends To Advertisers, As Teetotalers Are To Brewers, And Moral Censors Are To Books And Films. The Protesters Are The Best Acclaimers And Accelerators. Since The Advent Of Pictures, The Job Of The Ad Copy Is As Incidental And Latent As The 'meaning' Of A Poem Is To A Poem, Or The Words Of A Song Are To A Song.

One Matter Englishmen Don't Think In The Least Funny Is Their Happy Consciousness Of Possessing A Deep Sense Of Humor.

Persons Grouped Around A Fire Or Candle For Warmth Or Light Are Less Able To Pursue Independent Thoughts, Or Even Tasks, Than People Supplied With Electric Light. In The Same Way, The Social And Educational Patterns Latent In Automation Are Those Of Self-employment And Artistic Autonomy.

Advertising Is An Environmental Striptease For A World Of Abundance.

The Artist Must Ever Play And Experiment With New Means Of Arranging Experience, Even Though The Majority Of His Audience May Prefer To Remain Fixed In Their Old Perceptual Attitudes.

By Phonemic Trans-formation Into Visual Terms, The Alphabet Became A Universal, Abstract, Static Container Of Meaningless Sounds.

There Ain't No Grammatical Errors In A Non-literate Society.

Logos Is The Formal Cause Of The Kosmos And All Things, Responsible For Their Nature And Configuration.

Radical Changes Of Identity, Happening Suddenly And In Very Brief Intervals Of Time, Have Proved More Deadly And Destructive Of Human Values Than Wars Fought With Hardware Weapons.

The Specialist Is One Who Never Makes Small Mistakes While Moving Toward The Grand Fallacy.

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