Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.
Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.
The media have substituted themselves for the older world.
Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on.
Nowadays there is no conversation at all. Teachers distrust talk as much as business men.
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 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.
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.
Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes.
The modern nose, like the modern eye, has developed a sort of microscopic, intercellular intensity which makes our human contactspainful and revolting.
Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.
Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode – a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.
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.
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.
Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.
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 victory over Euclidean space was not achieved by isolated individuals, but by a field of young rebels opposed to all absolutes.
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.
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.
The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.