The only way to recover the old world is to induce the media into vomiting it back up.
Some of my fellow academics are very hostile, but I sympathize with them. They’ve been asleep for 500 years and they don’t like anybody who comes along and stirs them up.
Television is teaching all the time. Does more educating than the schools and all the institutions of higher learning.
Positively, the effect of speeding up temporal sequence is to abolish time, much as the telegraph and cable abolished space. Of course, the photograph does both.
A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.
Why is it so easy to acquire the solutions of past problems and so difficult to solve current ones.
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.
The computer is the most extraordinary of man’s technological clothing; it’s an extension of our central nervous system. Beside it, the wheel is a mere hula-hoop.
Good taste is the first refuge of the non creative. It is the last ditch stand of the artist.
The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.
Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy.
The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.
It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.
There is no more great men; there is only great committees.
In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses.
Invention is the mother of necessities.
Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.
The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.
The new media are not bridges between man and nature; they are nature.
Arists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium or to release the power of another.