"Gutenberg made all history available as classified data: the transportable book brought the world of the dead into the space of the gentlemen's library; the telegraph brought the entire world of the living to the workman's breakfast table. (p. 15)"

"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."

"The invention of typography confirmed and extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly repeatable “commodity,” the first assembly-line, and the first mass-production. (p. 142)"

"Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin'?"

"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."

"A fixed point of view becomes possible with print and ends the image as a plastic organism. (p. 144)"

"The potential of any new technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors. (p. 210)"

"We begin again to structure the primordial feelings...from which 3000 years of literacy divorced us. We begin again to live a myth. (p. 17)"

"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."

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

"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)"

"The celebrated earthy tactility of Rabelais is a massive backwash of receding manuscript culture. (p. 170)"

"Writing turned a spotlight on the high, dim Sierras of speech; writing was the visualization of acoustic space. It lit up the dark. (p. 14)"

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

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

"Bless advertising art for its pictorial vitality and verbal creativity. (p. 18)"

"Our book technology has Gutenberg at one end and the Ford assembly lines at the other. Both are obsolete. (p. 99)"

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

"The “natural magic” of the camera obscura anticipated Hollywood in turning the spectacle of the external world into a consumer commodity or package. (p. 146)"

"The Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings. (p. 14)"

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

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

"The metropolis today is a classroom; the ads are its teachers. The traditional classroom is an obsolete detention home, a feudal dungeon. (p. 12)"

"Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog. (p. 13)"

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

"Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on. (p. 120)"

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

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

"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)"

"For the oral man the literal text contains all possible levels of meaning. (p. 126)"

"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 city no longer exists except as a cultural ghost for tourists. Any highway eatery with its TV set, newspaper and magazine is as cosmopolitan as New York or Paris. (p.12)"

"By surpassing writing, we have regained our wholeness, not on a national or cultural but cosmic plane."

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

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

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

"Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture."

"Headlines are icons, not literature. (p. 5)"

"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)"

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

"The stock market was created by the telegraph and the telephone, and its panics are engineered by carefully orchestrated stories in the press. (p. 106)"

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

"The medieval student had to be paleographer, editor, and publisher of the authors he read. (p. 109)"

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

"The sheer increase in the quantity of information movement favoured the visual organization of knowledge and the rise of perspective even before typography. (p. 128)"

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