"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)"

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of culture, as Harold Innis was the first to show. (p. 56)"

"The Homeric hero becomes a split-man as he assumes an individual ego. (p. 58)"

"The world of the Greeks illustrates why visual appearances cannot interest people before the interiorization of alphabetic technology. (p. 61)"

"The Greek “point of view” in both art and chronology has little in common with ours but was much like that of the Middle Ages. (p. 64)"

"The Greeks invented both their artistic and scientific novelties after the interiorization of the alphabet. (p. 66)"

"The increase of visual stress among the Greeks alienated them from the primitive art that the electronic age now reinvents after interiorizing the “unified field” of electric all-at-onceness. (p. 72)"

"A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space. (p. 73)"

"Primitivism has become the vulgar cliche of much modern art and speculation. (p. 77)"

"The method of the twentieth century is to use not single but multiple models for experimental exploration – the technique of the suspended judgement. (p. 81)"

"Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic. (p. 84)"

"Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies. (p. 86)"

"In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud. (p. 94)"

"Manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication as performance. (p. 96)"

"The manuscript shaped medieval literary conventions at all levels. (p. 99)"

"The typographic lore of school children points to the gap between the scribal and typographic man. (p. 103)"

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

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

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

"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)"

"Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class. (p. 136)"

"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)"

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

"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)"

"Scribal culture could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by typography. (p. 149)"

"Until more than two centuries after printing nobody discovered how to maintain a single tone or attitude throughout a prose composition. (p. 154)"

"The “interface” of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism – a formula for blitz and metamorphosis. (p. 161)"

"Rabelais offers a vision of the future of print culture as a consumer's paradise of applied knowledge. (p. 167)"

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

"Typography as the first mechanization of a handicraft is itself the perfect instance not of a new knowledge, but of applied knowledge. (p. 171)"

"Every technology contrived and “outered” by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization. (p. 174)"

"With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life. (p. 177)"

"Applied knowledge in the Renaissance had to take the form of translation of the auditory into visual terms, of the plastic into retinal form. (p. 180)"

"Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity. (p. 183)"

"Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of communal interdependence. (p. 186)"

"The print-made split between head and heart is the trauma which affects Europe from Machiavelli till the present. (p. 193)"

"Dantzig explains why the language of number had to be increased to meet the needs created by the new technology of letters. (p. 200)"

"The Greeks encountered the confusion of tongues when numbers invaded Euclidean space. (p. 203)"

"The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators. (p. 205)"

"Bacon's Adam is a medieval mystic and Milton's a trade union organizer. (p. 214)"

"Aretino, like Rabelais and Cervantes, proclaimed the meaning of Typography as Gargantuan, Fantastic, Supra-human. (p. 220)"

"Marlowe anticipated Whitman's barbaric yawp by setting up a national PA system of blank verse – a rising iambic system of sound to suit the new success story. (p. 223)"

"Print, in turning the vernaculars into mass media, or closed systems, created the uniform, centralizing forces of modern nationalism. (p. 226)"