"The
medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social
consequences of any medium,— that is, of any extension of ourselves—result
from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension
of ourselves or by any new technology."
"The
new electronic interdependence re-creates the world in the image of
a global village."
"The
computer is the most extraordinary of man's technological clothing;
it's an extension of our central nervous system. Besides it, the wheel
is a mere hula-hoop."
"The
wheel is an extension of the foot. The book is an extension of the eye.
Clothing, an extension of the skin. Electric circuitry, an extension
of the central nervous system."
"It
was R. W. Emerson who wrote that 'the human body is the magazine of
inventions, the patent-office, where are the models from which every
hint was taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions
of its limbs and senses.'"
"There
are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew."
"We
become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us."
"We
drive into the future using only our rearview mirror."
"The
past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend
always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most
recent past. We look at the present through a rearview mirror. We march
backwards into the future."
"The
spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go
of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way."
"One
of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually
in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can
cope with."
"Our
Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's
job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts."
"Societies
have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men
communicate than by the content of the communication."
"A
typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it."
"I
have, by the way, a peculiar reading habit, developed in the recent
years: I read only the right hand page of serious books. If it's a frivolous
relaxing book, I read every word. But serious books I read on the right
hand side only, because I have discovered enormous redundancy in any
well-written book, and I find that by reading only the right hand page,
this keeps me very wide awake, filling in the other page out of my own
noodle."
"Advertising
is an environmental strip tease for a world of abundance."
"Ads
are the cave art of the twentieth century."
"Madison
Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness,
a demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation."
"The
modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no
objection to being eaten by the wolf."
"Art
at its most significance is a Distant Early Warning System that can
always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen
to it."
"A
point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight
and understanding."
"Most
of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness."
"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."
"The more the data banks record about each one of
us, the less we exist."
"Anyone
who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment
doesn't know the first thing about either."
"The
scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything
except his specialty."
"Politics
will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only
too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will
be much more powerful than he could ever be."
"Today
the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher,
he shepherds his flock in the ways of utility and comfort."
"Where
the whole man is involved, there is no work. Work begins with the division
of labor."
"There
is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to
contemplate what is happening."
"The
twentieth century encounter between alphabetic and electronic faces
of culture confers on the printed word a crucial role in staying the
return to The Africa Within."