Great Throughts Treasury

"The medieval student had to be paleographer, editor, and publisher of the authors he read."

"The metropolis today is a classroom; the ads are its teachers. The traditional classroom is an obsolete detention home, a feudal dungeon."

"The modern little red riding hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objections to being eaten by the wolf."

"The more data banks record about us, the less we exist."

"The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist."

"The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity."

"The mosaic form of the TV image demands participation and involvement in depth, of the whole being, as does the sense of touch."

"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, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing - you, your family, your neighborhood, your education, your job, your government, your relation to ?the others.? And they?re changing dramatically."

"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."

"The message of radio is one of violent, unified implosion and resonance."

"The method of the twentieth century is to use not single but multiple models for experimental exploration ? the technique of the suspended judgment."

"The most human thing about us is our technology."

"The mother tongue is propaganda."

"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."

"The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers."

"The new electric environment of simultaneous and diversified information creates acoustic man. He is surrounded by sound ? from behind, from the side, from above. His environment is made up of information in all kinds of simultaneous forms, and he puts on this electric environment as we put on our clothes, or as the fish puts on water."

"The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village."

"The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature... The new media are not ways of relating us to the old world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will."

"The new media are not ways of relating to us the 'real' world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will."

"The new overkill is simply an extension of our nervous system into a total ecological service environment. Such a service environment can liquidate or terminate its beneficiaries as naturally as it sustains them."

"The new science of communication is percept, not concept."

"The newspaper is a corporate symbolist poem, environmental and invisible, as poem."

"The nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images."

"The only cool PR is provided by one's enemies. They toil incessantly and for free."

"The only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions"

"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 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 percept takes priority of the concept."

"The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar."

"The poet, the artist, the sleuth - whoever sharpens our perception tends to be anti-social, rarely 'well-adjusted,' he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among anti-social types in their power to see environments as they really are."

"The portability of the book, like that of the easel-painting, added much to the new culture of individualism."

"The potential of any new technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors."

"The pre-atomist multisensory void was an animate, pulsating, and moving vibrant interval, neither container nor contained, acoustic space penetrated by tactility."

"The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention."

"The present volume to this point might be regarded as a gloss on a single text of Harold Innis: "The effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century.""

"The press is a group confessional form that provides communal participation. The book is a private confessional form that provides a ?point of view.?"

"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."

"The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare."

"The printing press, the computer, and television are not therefore simply machines which convey information. They are metaphors through which we conceptualize reality in one way or another. They will classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, argue a case for what it is like. Through these media metaphors, we do not see the world as it is. We see it as our coding systems are. Such is the power of the form of information."

"The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the ground rules of the environment. The ground rules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serves as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware."

"The print-made split between head and heart is the trauma which affects Europe from Machiavelli till the present. Dantzig explains why the language of number had to be increased to meet the needs created by the new technology of letters."

"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."

"The reduction of the tactile qualities of life and language constitute the refinement sought in the Renaissance and repudiated now in the electronic age."

"The school system, custodian of print culture, has no place for the rugged individual. It is, indeed, the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing."

"The real news is bad news."

"The role of the artist is to create an Anti-environment as a means of perception and adjustment."

"The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty."

"The sheer increase in the quantity of information movement favored the visual organization of knowledge and the rise of perspective even before typography."

"The sculptural qualities of the image dim down the purely personal identity."

"The sociologist permits himself to see only what is acceptable to his colleagues."