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

-Marshall McLuhan

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When Information Rubs Against

Marshall McLuhan

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

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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

There Is No Individualism In Eastern Or Oral Cultures.

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

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

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

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

The Huge Advantage Of Canada Is Its Backwardness.

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

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

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

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

Technology Is That Which Separates Us From Our Environment.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Clear Prose Indicates The Absence Of Thought.

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.

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

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

In Large Measure, Writing Is The Spatialization Of Thought.

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.

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

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

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

Language Is A Form Of Organized Stutter.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Our Technology Forces Us To Live Mythically

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Current Illusion Is That Science Has Abolished All Natural Laws.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

All Advertising Advertises Advertising.

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

Life. Consider The Alternative.

Affluence Creates Poverty.

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

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.

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.

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.

Most Of Our Assumptions Have Outlived Their Uselessness.

The 'expert' Is The Man Who Stays Put.

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.

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

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.

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

Fish Did Not Discover Water.

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.

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.

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

All Media Work Us Over Completely.

Cultural Change

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

All Words, In Every Language, Are Metaphors.

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.

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 Future Of Work Consists Of Learning A Living.

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.

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.

[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.

We Go Forward Looking In The Rearview Mirror.

Rearview Mirror

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?

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?

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

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.

Schizophrenia May Be A Necessary Consequence Of Literacy.

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

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

Money Is A Poor Man's Credit Card.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Attention Spans Get Very Weak At The Speed Of Light, And That Goes Along With A Very Weak Identity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Permanent Address Is Tommorrow.

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.

The Media Have Substituted Themselves For The Older World.

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 Medium Is The Message.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Characteristics

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 Ignorance Of How To Use Knowledge Stockpiles Exponentially.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I Do Not Explain, I Explore.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Jokes Are Grievances.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Electricity Does Not Centralize, But Decentralizes.

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

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

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.

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

Any Breakdown Is A Breakthrough.

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.

The Answers Are Always Inside The Problem, Not Outside.

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

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

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

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.

Nobody Can Commit Photography Alone.

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 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.

Invention Is The Mother Of Necessities.

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