"One naturally regrets not being an expert or one of those insiders who thoroughly understand. It's hell to be an amateur. A little reflection calms your sorrow, however. The experts in their own little speedboat, the rest of us floating with the rest of mankind in a great barge — that is the picture."

"Languages are environments to which the child related synesthetically. (p. 166)"

"Marshall McLuhan prophesized that the global electronic age would bring about a rebirth of oral culture. He wrote that orality breeds complexity while literacy breeds homogeneity. The nonlinear understanding of space-time characteristic of oral cultures is making a comeback in the new context created by the Internet and globalization. Latin America, with its immense diversity of languages and cultures, offers a prolific reservoir for the future. The richness of its poetry stems from the interaction between oral culture and literacy, which creates fertile ground for experimentation. The new historical developments point to a much wider participation by women and indigenous poets writing in their own languages. A wide range of migrant or nomadic voices add to its complexity. Dante Alighieri wrote in the fourteenth century that the spirit of poetry abounds "in the tangled constructions and defective pronunciations" of vernacular speech where language is renewed and transformed. His vision resonates today with the faulty speech of migrants creating the sounds and intonations of the future."

"1968 was a time of shocking modernism, and modernism always fascinates the young and perplexes the old, yet in retrospect it was a time of an almost quaint innocence. Imagine Columbia students in New York and University of Paris students discovering from a distance that their experiences were similar and then meeting, gingerly approaching one another to find out what, if anything, they had in common. With amazement and excitement, people learned that they were using the same tactics in Prague, in Paris, in Rome, in Mexico, in New York. With new tools such as communication satellites and inexpensive erasable videotape, television was making everyone very aware of what everyone else was doing, and it was thrilling because for the first time in human experience the important, distant events of the day were immediate. It will never be new again. “Global village” is a sixties term invented by Marshall McLuhan. The shrinking of the globe will never be so shocking in the same way that we will never again feel the thrill of the first moon shots or the first broadcasts from outer space. We now live in a world in which we await a new breakthrough every day. If another 1968 generation is ever produced, its movements will all have Web sites, carefully monitored by law enforcement, while they are e-mailing one another for updates. And no doubt other tools will be invented. But even the idea of new inventions has become banal."

"The digital divide is alive and growing stronger. This reality has made it imperative not to lose sight of the political economic infrastructures of media technologies and certainly never to take McLuhan's metaphors too literally."

"Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin'?"

"Suppose he is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov --- what if he is right?"

"It is perhaps typical of very creative minds that they hit very large nails not quite on the head."

"We are swiftly moving at present from an era where business was our culture into an era when culture will be our business. Between these poles stand the huge and ambiguous entertainment industries. (p. 384)"

"War has become the environment of our time if only because it is an accelerated form of innovation and education. (p. 381)"

"Violence is the effort to maintain and restore a weakened psyche. (p. 377)"

"By electricity we have not been driven out of our senses so much as our senses have been driven out of us. (p. 375)"

"The sociologist permits himself to see only what is acceptable to his colleagues. (p. 370)"

"The sculptural qualities of the image dim down the purely personal identity. (p. 369)"

"Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation. (p. 362)"

"The nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images. (p. 360)"

"The new science of communication is percept, not concept. (p. 259)"

"The mask, like the side-show freak, is mainly participatory rather than pictorial in its sensory appeal. (p. 352)"

"The magic of the cave image lies in its being, not in its being seen. The symbolic does not refer. It is. (p. 350)"

"The images of mankind have become the most basic thing about them. And they're all software, and disembodied. (p. 346)"

"In Chinese, honesty is the figure of a man standing, physically standing, beside his work. That means honesty: a man stands by his work. Two things: figure / ground. (p. 314)"

"I am a pattern watcher. (p. 311)"

"Great ages of innovation are the ages in which entire cultures are junked or scrapped. (p. 309)"

"Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always preceed causes in the actual developmental order. (p. 303)"

"Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure but metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing in terms of another. (p. 298)"

"Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama. (p. 275)"

"The 4 aspects of each of the media actually constitute the four features of all metaphors. In other words, all human technologies whatever are, in the fullest sense, linguistic outerings, or utterings, of man. (p. 275)"

"Language is a sense, like touch. (p. 271)"

"There is no connection between the elements in an electric world, which is equivalent to being surrounded by the human unconscious. (p. 260)"

"Our senses are not receptors so much as reactors and makers of different modalities of space. Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things, but the very life of things in the mind. (p. 256)"

"Language alone includes all the senses in interplay at all times. (p. 253)"

"Logic is figure without a ground. (p. 241)"

"All of man's artefacts, whether hardware or software, whether bulldozers or laws of chemistry, are alike linguistic in structure and intent. (p. 227)"

"The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive. (p. 201)"

"With TV, came the icon, the inclusive image, the inclusive political posture or stance. (p. 191)"

"People don't actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath. (p. 184)"

"Every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience. (p. 171)"

"It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV. (p. 53)"

"We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation. (xx)"

"In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin. (p. 47)"

"The book is a private confessional form that provides a “point of view.”"

"We are numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture. (p. 16)"

"Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement. (p. 113)"

"The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography. The printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, created extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly. (p. 23)"

"The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers."

"The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message. (p. 8)"

"The "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. (p. 8)"

"One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information system. (p. 298)"

"The press is a group confessional form that provides communal participation. The book is a private confessional form that provides a “point of view.” (p. 204)"

"All media exists to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values. (p. 199)"