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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.

-Marshall McLuhan

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New Media May At

Marshall McLuhan

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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.

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I Am Curious To Know What Would Happen 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.

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.

All Words, In Every Language, Are Metaphors.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Diaper Backward Spells Repaid. Think About It.

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

Advertising Business

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.

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.

As The Age Of Information Demands The Simultaneous Use Of All Our Faculties, We Discover That We Are Most At Leisure When We Are Most Intensely Involved.

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

First We Shape Our Tools, Thereafter They Shape Us

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

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

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.

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

The Story Begins Only When The Book Closes.

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

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

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

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

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 Criminal, Like The Artist, Is A Social Explorer.

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

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

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

Fish Did Not Discover Water.

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.

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.

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

The Real News Is Bad News.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Affluence Creates Poverty.

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.

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.

I Expect To See The Coming Decades Transform The Planet Into An Art Form; The New Man, Linked In A Cosmic Harmony That Transcends Time And Space, Will Sensuously Caress And Mold And Pattern Every Facet Of The Terrestrial Artifact As If It Were A Work Of Art, And Man Himself Will Become An Organic Art Form.

The Only People Who Have Proof Of Their Sanity Are Those Who Have Been Discharged From Mental Institutions

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.

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.

We Drive Into The Future Using Only Our Rearview Mirror.

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

Clear Prose Indicates The Absence Of Thought.

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

The Family Circle Has Widened. The Worldpool Of Information Fathered By The Electric Media--movies, Telstar, Flight--far Surpassesany Possible Influence Mom And Dad Can Now Bring To Bear. Character No Longer Is Shaped By Only Two Earnest, Fumbling Experts. Now All The World's A Sage.

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

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.

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

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

We Go Forward Looking In The Rearview Mirror.

Rearview Mirror

Advertising Is An Environmental Striptease For A World Of Abundance.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

You See, Dad, Professor Mcluhan Says That The Environment That Man Creates Becomes His Medium For Defining His Role In It. The Invention Of Type Created Linear, Or Sequential Thought, Separating Thought From Action. Now, With Tv And Folk Singing, Thought And Action Are Closer And Social Involvement Is Greater. We Again Live In A Village. Get It?

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.

Politics Will Eventually Be Replaced By Imagery. The Politician Will Be Only Too Happy To Abdicate In Favor Of His Image, Because The Image Will Be So Much More Powerful Than He Could Ever Be.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Technology Is That Which Separates Us From Our Environment.

All Media Work Us Over Completely.

Cultural Change

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

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.

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.

"work" Does Not Exist In A Nonliterate World. The Primitive Hunter Or Fisherman Did No Work, Any More Than Does The Poet, Painter, Or Thinker Of Today. Where The Whole Man Is Involved There Is No Work.

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.

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

Our Technology Forces Us To Live Mythically

The Medium Is The Message" Because It Is The Medium That Shapes And Controls The Search And Form Of Human Associations And Action.

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.

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.

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.

Most Of Our Assumptions Have Outlived Their Uselessness.

Until Writing Was Invented, Man Lived In Acoustic Space: Boundless, Directionless, Horizonless, In The Dark Of The Mind, In The World Of Emotion.

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.

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

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

Electricity Does Not Centralize, But Decentralizes.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Even Mud Gives The Illusion Of Depth.

The Ignorance Of How To Use Knowledge Stockpiles Exponentially.

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.

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

I Don't Necessarily Agree With Everything I Say.

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.

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.

A Nomadic Society Cannot Experience Enclosed Space.

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

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

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.

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.

Mysticism Is Just Tomorrow's Science Dreamed Today.

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

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

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

Division Of Labor

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

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

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

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.

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

All Advertising Advertises Advertising.

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

[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.

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

For Tribal Man, Space Was The Uncontrollable Mystery. For Technological Man It Is Time That Occupies The Same Role.

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

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.

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

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

Our Permanent Address Is Tommorrow.

Publication Is A Self-invasion Of Privacy.

Antipathy, Dissimilarity Of Views, Hate, Contempt, Can Accompany True Love.

I Do Not Explain, I Explore.

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

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.

Any Breakdown Is A Breakthrough.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

To See A Man Slip On A Banana Skin Is To See A Rationally Structured System Suddenly Translated Into A Whirling Machine.

The Future Of Work Consists Of Learning A Living.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Characteristics

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.

Except For Light, All Other Media Come In Pairs, With One Acting As The "content" Of The Other, Obscuring The Operation Of Both.

If It Works, It's Obsolete.

Obsolescence Is The Moment Of Superabundance.

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 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.

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.

Language Is A Form Of Organized Stutter.

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

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

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

Invention Is The Mother Of Necessities.

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.

Television Is Teaching All The Time. Does More Educating Than The Schools And All The Institutions Of Higher Learning.

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

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

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.

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

There Is Absolutely No Inevitability, So Long As There Is A Willingness To Contemplate What Is Happening.

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

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

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

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.

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

All Meaning Alters With Acceleration, Because All Patterns Of Personal And Political Interdependence Change With Any Acceleration Of Information.

A Light Bulb Creates An Environment By Its Mere Presence.

First We Build The Tools, Then They Build Us.

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.

The Content Or Time-clothing Of Any Medium Or Culture Is The Preceding Medium Or Culture.

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

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

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.

The Price Of Eternal Vigilance Is Indifference.

Schizophrenia May Be A Necessary Consequence Of Literacy.

When Information Overload Occurs, Pattern Recognition Is How To Determine Truth.

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.

Ads Are Carefully Designed By The Madison Avenue Frog-men Of-the-mind For Semiconscious Exposure.

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

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.

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

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

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