Background Image

...

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.

-Marshall McLuhan

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

I Am Resolutely Opposed

Marshall McLuhan

...

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.

Views: 10

Topic

More From Marshall McLuhan

[cameras] Tend To Turn People Into Things And The Photograph Extends And Multiplies The Human Image To The Proportions Of Mass-produced Merchandise And, [in The Age Of Photography] The World Itself Becomes A Sort Of Museum Of Objects That Have Been Encountered Before In Some Other Museum And To Say That The Camera Cannot Lie Is Merely To Underline The Multiple Deceits That Are Now Practiced In Its Name.

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

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

The Student Of Media Soon Comes To Expect The New Media Of Any Period Whatever To Be Classed As 'pseudo' By Those Who Acquired The Patterns Of Earlier Media, Whatever They May Happen To Be.

In Big Industry New Ideas Are Invited To Rear Their Heads So They Can Be Clobbered At Once. The Idea Department Of A Big Firm Is A Sort Of Lab For Isolating Dangerous Viruses.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Huck Finn. Loss Of Identity Drives People To Nostalgia. Electronic Man Has No Physical Body, So He [jimmy Carter] Puts Nostalgia In Its Place.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

One Main Condition Of Aristocratic Life Was Present In The South And Not In The North--personal Responsibility To Other Human Beings For Education And Material Welfare. (a Carnegie Or A Ford, Like A Bureaucracy, Molds The Lives Of Millions Without Taking Any Responsibility.)

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Our Permanent Address Is Tommorrow.

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

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

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

World War Iii Is A Guerrilla Information War With No Division Between Military And Civilian Participation.

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

Division Of Labor

We Drive Into The Future Using Only Our Rearview Mirror.

The Victory Over Euclidean Space Was Not Achieved By Isolated Individuals, But By A Field Of Young Rebels Opposed To All Absolutes.

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

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

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.

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

Characteristics

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.

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

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.

Positively, The Effect Of Speeding Up Temporal Sequence Is To Abolish Time, Much As The Telegraph And Cable Abolished Space. Of Course, The Photograph Does Both.

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.

Of The Many Unforeseen Consequences Of Typography, The Emergence Of Nationalism Is, Perhaps, The Most Familiar

Youth Instinctively Understand The Present Environment - The Electric Drama. It Lives Mythically And In Depth.

Obsolescence Is The Moment Of Superabundance.

... Their Power To See Environments As They Really Are.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Electricity Does Not Centralize, But Decentralizes.

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

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

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

The Mark Of Our Time Is Its Revulsion Against Imposed Patterns.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

In Jesus Christ, There Is No Distance Or Separation Between The Medium And The Message: It Is The One Case Where We Can Say That The Medium And The Message Are Fully One And The Same.

Diaper Backward Spells Repaid. Think About It.

All Words, In Every Language, Are Metaphors.

During The Second War, The U.s.o. Sent Special Issues Of The Principal American Magazines To The Armed Forces, With The Ads Omitted. The Men Insisted On Having The Ads Back Again. Naturally. The Ads Are By Far The Best Part Of Any Magazine Or Newspaper. More Pains And Thought, More Wit And Art Go Into The Making Of An Ad Than Into Any Prose Feature Of Press Or Magazine. Ads Are News. What Is Wrong With Them Is That They Are Always Good News.

Invention Is The Mother Of Necessities.

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.

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

The Criminal, Like The Artist, Is A Social Explorer.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advertising Is An Environmental Striptease For A World Of Abundance.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

People Who Write Obscurely Are Either Unskilled In Writing Or Up To Mischief.

Jokes Are Grievances.

We Have To Find The Environments In Which It Will Be Possible To Live With Our New Inventions.

Primitivism Has Become The Vulgar Cliché Of Much Modern Art And Speculation.

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.

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.

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

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

The Subliminal Depths Of Radio Are Charged With The Resonating Echoes Of Tribal Horns And Antique Drums. This Is Inherent In The Very Nature Of This Medium, With Its Power To Turn The Psyche And Society Into A Single Echo Chamber.

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

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

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.

Human Perception Is Literally Incarnation.

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

Even Mud Gives The Illusion Of Depth.

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

The Answers Are Always Inside The Problem, Not Outside.

The Media Have Substituted Themselves For The Older World.

If It Works, It's Obsolete.

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

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.

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.

Obsolescence Never Meant The End Of Anything, It's Just The Beginning.

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.

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

Human Experience

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

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

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.

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

If Men Were Able To Be Convinced That Art Is A Precise Advance Knowledge Of How To Cope With The Psychic And Social Consequences Of The Next Technology, Would They All Become Artist? Or Would They Begin A Careful Translation Of New Art Forms Into Social Navigation Charts? I Am Curious To Know What Would Happem If Art Were Suddenly Seen For What It Is, Namely, Exact Information Of How To Rearrange One's Psyche In Order To Anticipate The Next Blow From Our Own Extended Faculties.

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

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

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.

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

The Suddenness Of The Leap From Hardware To Software Cannot But Produce A Period Of Anarchy And Collapse, Especially In The Developed Countries.

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.

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

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

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

Advertising Business

The Future Of Work Consists Of Learning A Living.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

The Rythms Of Typing Favour Short, Concise Sentences, Sentences With Oral Form.

The Greatest Propaganda In The World Is Our Mother Tongue, That Is What We Learn As Children, And Which We Learn Unconsciously. That Shapes Our Perceptions For Life. That Is Propaganda At Its Most Extreme Form.

In The Phaedrus, Plato Argued That The New Arrival Of Writing Would Revolutionize Culture For The Worst. He Suggested That It Would Substitute Reminiscence For Thought And Mechanical Learning For The True Dialect Of The Living Quest For Truth By Discourse And Conversation.

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

Whence Did The Wond'rous Mystic Art Arise, / Of Painting Speech, And Speaking To The Eyes? / That We By Tracing Magic Lines Are Taught, / How To Embody, And To Colour Thought?

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 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.

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

Pornography And Violence Are By-products Of Societies In Which Private Identity Has Been ... Destroyed By Sudden Environmental Change.

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.

The Percept Takes Priority Of The Concept.

Control Over Change Would Seem To Consist In Moving Not With It But Ahead Of It. Anticipation Gives The Power To Deflect And Control Force.

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.

Gutenberg Made Everybody A Reader. Xerox Makes Everybody A Publisher.

Mass Man Is A Phenomenon Of Electric Speed, Not Of Physical Quantity.

Medieval And Ancient Sensibility Now Dominates Our Time As Acoustic And Multisensory Awareness Displaces The Merely Visual.

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

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.

Schizophrenia May Be A Necessary Consequence Of Literacy.

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

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.

In Antiquity And The Middle Ages Reading Was Necessarily Reading Aloud.

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

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.

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

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

Art Is Anything You Can Get Away With.

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

The News Automatically Becomes The Real World For The Tv User And Is Not A Substitute For Reality, But Is Itself An Immediate Reality.

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.

If A Work Of Art Is To Explore New Environments, It Is Not To Be Regarded As A Blueprint But Rather As A Form Of Action-painting.

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.

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

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.

All Advertising Advertises Advertising.

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.

We Go Forward Looking In The Rearview Mirror.

Rearview Mirror

The Story Begins Only When The Book Closes.

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

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

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

Clear Prose Indicates The Absence Of Thought.

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 Ignorance Of How To Use Knowledge Stockpiles Exponentially.

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

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

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.

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

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.

An Administrator In A Bureaucratic World Is A Man Who Can Feel Big By Merging His Non-entity In An Abstraction. A Real Person In Touch With Real Things Inspires Terror In Him.

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.

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

In Large Measure, Writing Is The Spatialization Of Thought.

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 A Rule, I Always Look For What Others Ignore.

Trending Author

Raymond Chandler

Shirley MacLaine

Category