Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression.
The poet, the artist, the sleuth, whoever sharpens our perception tends to antisocial; rarely ‘well adjusted,’ he cannot go along with currents and trends.
At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.
In Tetrad form, the artifact is seen to be not neutral or passive, bur an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground.
By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.
The suddenness of the leap from hardware to software cannot but produce a period of anarchy and collapse, especially in the developed countries.
I may be wrong, but I’m never in doubt.
Ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure.
The news automatically becomes the real world for the TV user and is not a substitute for reality, but is itself an immediate reality.
If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire.
The real news is bad news.
Life. Consider the alternative.
I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.
All media work us over completely.
One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.
If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist’s couch.
A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion.
An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.