Canadians are the people who learned to live without the bold accents of the natural ego-trippers of other lands.
Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.
The ‘expert’ is the man who stays put.
All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.
A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.
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.
The ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium.
We impose the form of the old on the content of the new.
Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity.
Most clear writing is a sign that there is no exploration going on. Clear prose indicates the absence of thought.
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.
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.
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.
The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.
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.
When information overload occurs, pattern recognition is how to determine truth.
Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.
The school system is the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.
Information and images bump against each other every day in massive quantities, and the resonance of this interfacing is like the babble of a village or tavern gossip session.
The percept takes priority of the concept.