Background Image

...

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.

-Marshall McLuhan

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

I Am Not A

Marshall McLuhan

...

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.

Views: 6

Topic

More From Marshall McLuhan

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

Anyone Who Tries To Make A Distinction Between Education And Entertainment Doesn't Know The First Thing About Either.

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.

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

All Words, In Every Language, Are Metaphors.

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

Our Motor Car Is Our Supreme Form Of Privacy When We Are Away From Home.

Everybody Experiences Far More Than He Understands. Yet It Is Experience, Rather Than Understanding, That Influences Behavior.

If It Works, It's Obsolete.

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

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

Characteristics

The Logos Of Creation, 'and God Said ...' Formed The Basis Of Christian Interpretation Of The 'book Of Nature.

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

Innovation For Holders Of Conventional Wisdom Is Not Novelty But Annihilation.

The Electric Age ... Established A Global Network That Has Much The Character Of Our Central Nervous System.

Typography Is Not Only A Technology But Is In Itself A Natural Resource Or Staple, Like Cotton Or Timber Or Radio; And, Like Any Staple, It Shapes Not Only Private Sense Ratios But Also Patterns Of Communal Interdependence.

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

Societies Have Always Been Shaped More By The Nature Of The Media By Which Men Communicate Than By The Content Of The Communication.

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.

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

Electricity Does Not Centralize, But Decentralizes.

There Is No Individualism In Eastern Or Oral Cultures.

Erwin Schrodinger Has Explained How He And His Fellow Physicists Had Agreed That They Would Report Their New Discoveries And Experiments In Quantum Physics In The Language Of Newtonian Physics. That Is, They Agreed To Discuss And Report The Non-visual, Electronic World In The Language Of The Visual World Of Newton.

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

With The Arrival Of Electric Technology, Man Extended, Or Set Outside Himself, A Live Model Of The Central Nervous System Itself. To The Degree That This Is So, It Is A Development That Suggests A Desperate And Suicidal Autoamputation, As If The Central Nervous System Could No Longer Depend On The Physical Organs To Be Protective Buffers Against The Slings And Arrows Of Outrageous Mechanism.

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.

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.

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

I Wouldn't Have Seen It If I Hadn't Believed It.

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.

All Advertising Advertises Advertising.

The Car Has Become The Carapace, The Protective And Aggressive Shell, Of Urban And Suburban Man.

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.

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

The Reader Is The Content Of Any Poem Or Of The Language He Employs, And In Order To Use Any Of These Forms, He Must Put Them On.

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.

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

Darkness Is To Space What Silence Is To Sound, I.e., The Interval.

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.

Art At Its Most Significant Is A Distant Early Warning System That Can Always Be Relied On To Tell The Old Culture What Is Beginning To Happen To It.

In The Land Of The Blind, The One-eyed Man Is A Hallucinating Idiot...for He Sees What No One Else Does: Things That, To Everyone Else, Are Not There.

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

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

Money Is A Poor Man's Credit Card.

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.

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

I Don't Necessarily Agree With Everything I Say.

Language As The Technology Of Human Extension, Whose Powers Of Division And Separation We Know So Well, May Have Been The "tower Of Babel" By Which Men Sought To Scale The Highest Heavens. Today Computers Hold Out The Promise Of A Means Of Instant Tr

If People Were Able To Be Convinced That Art Is Precise Advance Knowledge Of How To Cope With The Psychic And Social Consequences Of The Next Technology, Would They All Become Artists?

I Do Not Explain, I Explore.

All Forms Of Violence Are Quests For Identity. When You Live On The Frontier, You Have No Identity. You're A Nobody.

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.

Any Expensive Ad Represents The Toil, Attention, Testing, Wit, Art, And Skill Of Many People. 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.

Fish Did Not Discover Water.

All Media Work Us Over Completely.

Cultural Change

It Has Always Been The Artist Who Realizes That The Future Is The Present And Uses His Work To Prepare The Grounds For It

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

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

People Don't Actually Read Newspapers - They Get Into Them Every Morning Like A Hot Bath.

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

The Laws Of The Media, In Tetrad Form, Bring Logos And Formal Cause Up To Date To Reveal Analytically The Structure Of All Human Artefacts.

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

Appetite Is Essentially Insatiable, And Where It Operates As A Criterion Of Both Action And Enjoyment (that Is, Everywhere In The Western World Since The Sixteenth Century) It Will Infallibly Discover Congenial Agencies (mechanical And Political) Of Expression.

The Cave Art Of Madison Avenue Has Been By Far The Most Innovative And Educative Art Form Of The Twentieth Century.

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

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

The Medium Is The Message.

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.

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

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.

Education Is Civil Defence Against Media Fallout.

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

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

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

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

New Media Are New Archetypes, At First Disguised As Degradations Of Older Media.

Nothing Is Inevitable If We Are Willing To Contemplate What Is Happening.

The Answers Are Always Inside The Problem, Not Outside.

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

Technology Is That Which Separates Us From Our Environment.

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

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

There Are No Passengers On Spaceship Earth. We Are All Crew.

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

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.

The Name Of A Man Is A Numbing Blow From Which He Never Recovers.

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.

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.

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.

The New Electronic Independence Re-creates The World In The Image Of A Global Village.

When New Technologies Impose Themselves On Societies Long Habituated To Older Technologies, Anxieties Of All Kinds Result.

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

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.

In Tetrad Form, The Artifact Is Seen To Be Not Neutral Or Passive, Bur An Active Logos Or Utterance Of The Human Mind Or Body That Transforms The User And His Ground.

A New Medium Is Never An Addition To An Old One, Nor Does It Leave The Old One In Peace. It Never Ceases To Oppress The Older Media Until It Finds New Shapes And Positions For Them.

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.

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

The Village Had Institutionalized All Human Functions In Forms Of Low Intensity.... Participation Was High And Organization Was Low. This Is The Formula For Stability.

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.

If The Work Of The City Is The Remaking Or Translating Of Man Into A More Suitable Form Than His Nomadic Ancestors Achieved, Then Might Not Our Current Translation Of Our Entire Lives Into The Spiritual Form Of Information Seem To Make Of The Entire.

The Price Of Eternal Vigilance Is Indifference.

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

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.

The Alphabet And Print Technology Fostered And Encouraged A Fragmenting Process, A Process Of Specialism And Detachment. Electric Technology Fosters And Encourages Unification And Involvement.

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

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

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

At Electric Speed, All Forms Are Pushed To The Limits Of Their Potential.

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

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

In Large Measure, Writing Is The Spatialization Of Thought.

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

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.

Violence, Whether Spiritual Or Physical, Is A Quest For Identity And The Meaningful. The Less Identity, The More Violence.

People Hope That If They Scream Loudly Enough About "values" Then Others Will Mistake Them For Serious, Sensitive Souls Who Have Higher And Nobler Perceptions Than Ordinary People. Otherwise, Why Would They Be Screaming? Moral Bitterness Is A Basic Technique For Endowing The Idiot With Dignity.

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

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

Division Of Labor

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

Ads Represent The Main Channel Of Intellectual And Artistic Effort In The Modern World.

Canada Is The Only Country In The World That Knows How To Live Without An Identity.

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

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

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

Only Puny Secrets Need Protection. Big Discoveries Are Protected By Public Incredulity.

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

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

The Artist Is The Person Who Invents The Means To Bridge Between Biological Inheritance And The Environments Created By Technological Innovation.

The Real News Is Bad News.

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.

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

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 World Of Visual Perspective Is One Of Unified And Homogeneous Space. Such A World Is Alien To The Resonating Diversity Of Spoken Words. So Language Was The Last Art To Accept The Visual Logic Of Gutenberg Technology, And The First To Rebound In The Electric Age.

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.

North Americans Have A Peculiar Bias. They Go Outside To Be Alone And They Go Home To Be Social.

Technologies Themselves, Regardless Of Content, Produce A Hemispheric Bias In The Users.

Most People Are Alive In An Earlier Time, But You Must Be Alive In Our Own Time.

Mysticism Is Just Tomorrow's Science Dreamed Today.

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

The Alphabet Was One Thing When Applied To Clay Or Stone, And Quite Another When Set Down On Light Papyrus.

Television Brought The Brutality Of War Into The Comfort Of The Living Room. Vietnam Was Lost In The Living Rooms Of America - Not On The Battlefields Of Vietnam.

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.

Our Age Of Anxiety Is, In Great Part, The Result Of Trying To Do Today's Job With Yesterday's Tools And Yesterday's Concepts.

Publication Is A Self-invasion Of Privacy.

A Light Bulb Creates An Environment By Its Mere Presence.

Today It Is Not The Classroom Nor The Classics Which Are The Repositories Of Models Of Eloquence, But The Ad Agencies.

It Is One Of The Peculiar Characteristics Of The Photograph That It Isolates Single Moments In Time.

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.

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.

A Commercial Society Whose Members Are Essentially Ascetic And Indifferent In Social Ritual Has To Be Provided With Blueprints And Specifications For Evoking The Right Tone For Every Occasion.

There Are Many People For Whom 'thinking' Necessarily Means Identifying With Existing Trends.

I May Be Wrong, But I'm Never In Doubt.

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

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.

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.

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.

Explore The Situation. Statements Are Expendable. Don't Keep On Looking In The Rearview Mirror And Defending The Status Quo Which Is Outmoded The Moment It Happened.

Moral Indignation Is A Technique Used To Endow The Idiot With Dignity.

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

The Modern Nose, Like The Modern Eye, Has Developed A Sort Of Microscopic, Intercellular Intensity Which Makes Our Human Contactspainful And Revolting.

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

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.

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.

What Goes On Inside The School Is An Interruption Of Education.

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

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

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

As Technology Advances, It Reverses The Characteristics Of Every Situation Again And Again. The Age Of Automation Is Going To Be The Age Of 'do It Yourself.'

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.

The Business Of Art Is No Longer The Communication Of Thoughts Or Feelings Which Are To Be Conceptually Ordered, But A Direct Participation In An Experience. The Whole Tendency Of Modern Communication...is Towards Participation In A Process, Rather Than Apprehension Of Concepts.

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.

Language Is A Form Of Organized Stutter.

Nowadays There Is No Conversation At All. Teachers Distrust Talk As Much As Business Men.

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

Cubism ('multi-locationalism') Is One Of The Painterly Forms Of Acoustic Space.

Obsolescence Is The Moment Of Superabundance.

The Ignorance Of How To Use Knowledge Stockpiles Exponentially.

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.

A Moral Point Of View Too Often Serves As A Substitute For Understanding In Technological Matters.

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

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.

Madison Avenue Is A Very Powerful Aggression Against Private Consciousness. A Demand That You Yield Your Private Consciousness To Public Manipulation.

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

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

The User Of The Electric Light - Or A Hammer, Or A Language, Or A Book - Is The Content. As Such, There Is A Total Metamorphosis Of The User By The Interface. It Is The Metamorphosis That I Consider The Message.

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.

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

Advertising Business

Our Technology Forces Us To Live Mythically

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

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

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

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.

We Look At The Present Through A Rear View Mirror. We March Backwards Into The Future.

The Potential Of Any Technology Is Always Dissipated By Its Users Involvement In Its Predecessors...computer Are Still Serving Mainly To Sustain Precomputer Effects.

Great Art Speaks A Language Which Every Intelligent Person Can Understand. The People Who Call Themselves Modernists Today Speak A Different Language.

Most Clear Writing Is A Sign That There Is No Exploration Going On. Clear Prose Indicates The Absence Of Thought.

The Genteel Is A Mighty Catafalque Of Service-with-a-smile And Flattering Solicitude Smothering Every Spontaneous Movement Of Thought Or Feeling.

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

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

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

Literacy, The Visual Technology, Dissolved The Tribal Magic By Means Of Its Stress On Fragmentation And Specialization And Created The Individual.

Trending Author

Bainbridge Colby

Category