Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it’s just the beginning.
The genteel is a mighty catafalque of service-with-a-smile and flattering solicitude smothering every spontaneous movement of thought or feeling.
Any breakdown is a breakthrough.
Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher.
Education in a technological world of replaceable and expendable parts is neuter.
One matter Englishmen don’t think in the least funny is their happy consciousness of possessing a deep sense of humor.
The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.
To say that “the camera cannot lie” is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practised in its name.
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.
As a rule, I always look for what others ignore.
I am an intellectual thug who has been slowly accumulating a private arsenal with every intention of using it. In a mindless age every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon. Every man of good will is the enemy of society.
There is an impression abroad that literary folk are fast readers. Wine tasters are not heavy drinkers. Literary people read slowly because they sample the complex dimensions and flavors of words and phrases. They strive for totality not lineality. They are well aware that the words on the page have to be decanted with the utmost skill. Those who imagine they read only for “content” are illusioned.
In accepting an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame a few years ago, General David Sarnoff made this statement: “We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.
Today’s child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up.
War and the fear of war have always been considered the main incentives to technological extension of our bodies. Indeed, Lewis Mumford, in his The City in History, considers the walled city itself an extension of our skins, as much as housing and clothing. More even than the preparation for war, the aftermath of invasion is a rich technological period; because the subject culture has to adjust all its sense ratios to accommodate the impact of the invading culture.
Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. The groundrules, pervasive structure, and over-all patterns of environments elude easy perception.
Art is the sole means of grace in our fallen state.
Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment – of what’s really going on – affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions.
Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental.
Students of media are persistently attacked as evaders, idly concentrating on means or processes rather than on ‘substance’. The dramatic and rapid changes of ‘substance’ elude these accusers. Survival is not possible if one approaches his environment, the social drama, with a fixed, unchangeable point of view – the witless repetitive response to the unperceived.