Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.
In the century of jazz we are likely to overlook the emergence of the waltz as a hot and explosive human expression that broke through the formal feudal barriers of courtly and choral dance styles.
Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.
The present is only faced in any generation by the artist.
Delegated authority is lineal, visual, hierarchical. The authority of knowledge is nonlineal, nonvisual, and inclusive.
Homer’s Iliad was the cultural encyclopedia of pre-literate Greece, the didactic vehicle that provided men with guidance for the management of their spiritual, ethical, and social lives.
The “child” was an invention of the 17th century; he did not exist in, say, Shakespeare’s day. He had, up until that time, been merged in the adult world and there was nothing that could be called childhood in our sense.
Jack Paar mentioned that he once had said to a young friend, “Why do you kids use ‘cool’ to mean ‘hot’?” The friend replied, “Because you folks used up the word ‘hot’ before we came along.
Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions. Our “Age of Anxiety” is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools – with yesterday’s concepts.
The Newtonian God – the God who made a clock-like universe, wound it, and withdrew – died a long time ago. This is what Nietzsche meant and this is the God who is being observed.
Education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery – to probing and exploration and to the recognition of the language of forms.
Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition.
Television completes the cycle of the human sensorium. With the omnipresent ear and the moving eye, we have abolished writing, the specialized acoustic-visual metaphor that established the dynamics of Western civilization.
The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world is no longer a dream.
In the age of instant information man ends his job of fragmented specializing and assumes the role of information-gathering. Today information-gathering resumes the inclusive concept of “culture” exactly as the primitive food-gatherer worked in complete equilibrium with his entire environment. Our quarry now, in this new nomadic and “workless” world, is knowledge and insight into the creative processes of life and society.
The modern mind, whether in its subconscious collective dream or in its intellectual citadel of vivid awareness, is a stage on which is contained and re-enacted the entire experience of the human race.
The misleading effect of books like George Orwell’s 1984 is to project into the future a state of affairs that already exists.
Our time is a time to cross barriers, for erasing old categories – for probing around. When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised, put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result.
Thus, as passivity becomes extreme in the bulk of society, a sizeable segment of citizens detaches itself from the dream-locked majority. As vulgarity and stupidity thicken, more and more people awaken to the intolerability of their condition. Much can be done to foster this state of awareness, even though little can be done directly to change the policies of those in control today of the media of communication.
The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology, on and through which the American way of life was formed.
For the fragmented man creates the homogenized Western world, while oral societies are made up of people differentiated, not by their specialist skills or visible marks, but by their unique emotional mixes.