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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.

-Marshall McLuhan

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Pornography And Obscenity...work By

Marshall McLuhan

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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.

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In Large Measure, Writing Is The Spatialization Of Thought.

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

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.

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.

I Do Not Explain, I Explore.

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

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.

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.

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

If It Works, It's Obsolete.

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.

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

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

Schizophrenia May Be A Necessary Consequence Of Literacy.

We Are All Robots When Uncritically Involved With Our Technologies.

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.

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

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

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

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

Education Is Civil Defence Against Media Fallout.

A Nomadic Society Cannot Experience Enclosed Space.

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.

Affluence Creates Poverty.

Fish Did Not Discover Water.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

While Poe And The Symbolists Were Exploring The Irrational In Literature, Freud Had Begun To Explore The Resonant Figure/ground Double-plot Of The Conscious And Unconscious.

Our Technology Forces Us To Live Mythically

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?

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

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

Diaper Backward Spells Repaid. Think About It.

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

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

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

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

The Hallucinogenic World, In Environmental Terms, Can Be Considered As A Forlorn Effort Of Man To Match The Speed Of Power Of Hisextended Nervous System (which We Call The "electronic World") By Intensifying The Activity Of His Inner Nervous System.

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.

We Drive Into The Future Using Only Our Rearview Mirror.

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

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

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.

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

First We Build The Tools, Then They Build Us.

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

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

The Real News Is Bad News.

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.

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

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.

There Is No Individualism In Eastern Or Oral Cultures.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Nobody Can Commit Photography Alone.

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

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

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.

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

Most Of Our Assumptions Have Outlived Their Uselessness.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Only Way To Recover The Old World Is To Induce The Media Into Vomiting It Back Up.

On Spaceship Earth There Are No Passengers; Everybody Is A Member Of The Crew. We Have Moved Into An Age In Which Everybody's Activities Affect Everybody Else.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 Mother Tongue Is Propaganda.

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.

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

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 Percept Takes Priority Of The Concept.

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

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

The Ordinary Person Senses The Greatness Of The Odds Against Him Even Without Thought Or Analysis, And He Adapts His Attitudes Unconsciously. A Huge Passivity Has Settled On Industrial Society. For People Carried About In Mechanical Vehicles, Earning Their Living By Waiting On Machines, Listening Much Of The Waking Day To Canned Music, Watching Packaged Movie Entertainment And Capsulated News, For Such People It Would Require An Exceptional Degree Of Awareness And An Especial Heroism Of Effort To Be Anything But Supine Consumers Of Processed Goods.

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

I Don't Necessarily Agree With Everything I Say.

The School System Is The Homogenizing Hopper Into Which We Toss Our Integral Tots For Processing.

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.

[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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 'expert' Is The Man Who Stays Put.

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.

I Do Not Say Whether It Is A Good Or Bad Thing. To Do So Would Be Meaningless And Arrogant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

All Advertising Advertises Advertising.

Current Illusion Is That Science Has Abolished All Natural Laws.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Invention Is The Mother Of Necessities.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Obsolescence Is The Moment Of Superabundance.

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.

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

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

In This Electronic Age We See Ourselves Being Translated More And More Into The Form Of Information, Moving Toward The Technological Extension Of Consciousness.

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.

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

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

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

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

The Story Begins Only When The Book Closes.

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 Ignorance Of How To Use Knowledge Stockpiles Exponentially.

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

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.

The Price Of Eternal Vigilance Is Indifference.

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

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

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

Jokes Are Grievances.

Technology Is That Which Separates Us From Our Environment.

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.

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 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.

Advertising Is An Environmental Striptease For A World Of Abundance.

Publication Is A Self-invasion Of Privacy.

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.

All Media Work Us Over Completely.

Cultural Change

Violence Is The Quest For Identity. When Identity Disappears With Technological Innovation, Violence Is The Natural Recourse.

The Medium Is The Message. This Is Merely To Say That The Personal And Social Consequences Of Any Medium - That Is, Of Any Extension Of Ourselves - Result From The New Scale That Is Introduced Into Our Affairs By Each Extension Of Ourselves, Or By Any New Technology.

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

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

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

Our Permanent Address Is Tommorrow.

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.

We Go Forward Looking In The Rearview Mirror.

Rearview Mirror

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.

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

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

Electronic Man Has No Physical Body.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Human Experience

The Most Human Thing About Us Is Our Technology.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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