Great Throughts Treasury

"Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village size and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumor, and personal malice."

"Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener. That is the immediate aspect of radio. A private experience. 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."

"Radio comes to us ostensibly with person to person directness that is private and intimate, while in more urgent fact, it is really a subliminal echo chamber of magic power to touch remote and forgotten chords."

"Real life often appears, at least, to be an imitation of art. Today, it is poster art."

"Rationality or consciousness is itself a ratio or proportion among the sensuous components of experience, and is not something added to such sense experience. Sub-rational beings have no means of achieving such a ratio or proportion in their sense lives but are wired for fixed wave lengths, as it were, having infallibility in their own area of experience. Consciousness, complex and subtle, can be impaired or ended by a mere stepping-up or dimming-down of any one sense intensity, which is the procedure in hypnosis. And the intensification of one sense by a new medium can hypnotize an entire community."

"Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time."

"Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy."

"Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class."

"Scribal culture could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by typography."

"School is the advertising agency which makes you believe you need the society as it is."

"Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture."

"Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on."

"Sheer visual quantity evokes the magical resonance of the tribal hoard. The box office looms as a return to the echo chamber of bardic incantation."

"Since Sputnik, the earth has been wrapped in a dome-like blanket or bubble. Nature ended."

"Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information."

"Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a manmade environment that ends "Nature" and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed. Shakespeare at the Globe mentioning "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players" (As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7) has been justified by recent events in ways that would have struck him as entirely paradoxical. The results of living inside a proscenium arch of satellites is that the young now accept the public spaces of the earth as role-playing areas. Sensing this, they adopt costumes and roles and are ready to "do their thing" everywhere.""

"Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication."

"Some days, I wish the whole fucking world would just 'phone in sick."

"Tactility is the space of the interval; acoustic space is spherical and resonant."

"Tactility is space of the interval."

"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."

"Someone asked me if I really believed there was life after death. I replied: Do you really believe there is any life before death?"

"Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space...it is a cosmic, invisible architecture of the human dark."

"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."

"Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users."

"Technology is that which separates us from our environment."

"The "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs."

"The "tragic flaw" is not a detail of characterization, a mere "fly in the ointment", but a structural feature of ordinary consciousness."

"The ?interface? of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism ? a formula for blitz and metamorphosis."

"The ?natural magic? of the camera obscura anticipated Hollywood in turning the spectacle of the external world into a consumer commodity or package."

"The four aspects of each of the media actually constitute the four features of all metaphors. In other words, all human technologies whatever are, in the fullest sense, linguistic outerings, or utterings, of man."

"The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of culture, as Harold Innis was the first to show. The Homeric hero becomes a split-man as he assumes an individual ego."

"The Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings."

"The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography. The printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, created extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly."

"The artist is a person who is expert in the training of perception."

"The anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic history in King Lear."

"The American bureaucracy ... was set up for very slow speeds of the printed word and railways. At electric speeds, nothing in the USA makes sense."

"The artist is the only person; his antennae pick up these messages before anybody. So he is always thought of as being way ahead of his time because he lives in the present."

"The artists of our culture, 'the antennae of the race,' had tuned in to the new ground and begun exploring discontinuity and simultaneity."

"The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation."

"The audience, as ground, shapes and controls the work of art."

"The automated presidential surrogate is the superlative nobody."

"The artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience, even though the majority of his audience may prefer to remain fixed in their old perceptual attitudes."

"The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie."

"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 bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati."

"The book is a private confessional form that provides a ?point of view.?"

"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 car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound."

"The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man."