All Quotes

"The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie."

"The media have substituted themselves for the older world."

"The most human thing about us is our technology."

"The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati."

"Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been...destroyed by sudden environmental change."

"Pornography and obscenity...work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground -- situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks."

"Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction."

"Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence."

"Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century."

"Try not to have Emily exposed to hours and hours of TV. It is a vile drug which permeates the nervous system, especially in the young."

"I heard what you were saying. You - you know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing."

"One of the things that happens at the speed of light is that people lose their goals in life. So what takes the place of goals and objectives? Well, role-playing is coming in very fast."

"The discarnate TV user lives in a world between fantasy and dream, and is in a typically hypnotic state, which is the ultimate form and level of participation."

"You don't like those ideas? I got others!"

"Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a manmade environment that ends "Nature" and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed. Shakespeare at the Globe mentioning "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players" (As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7) has been justified by recent events in ways that would have struck him as entirely paradoxical. The results of living inside a proscenium arch of satellites is that the young now accept the public spaces of the earth as role-playing areas. Sensing this, they adopt costumes and roles and are ready to "do their thing" everywhere." (p.9-10)"

"The "tragic flaw" is not a detail of characterization, a mere "fly in the ointment", but a structural feature of ordinary consciousness. (p.45)"

"Jacques Ellul observes in Propaganda: When dialogue begins, propaganda ends. His theme, that propaganda is not this or that ideology but rather the action and coexistence of all media at once, explains why propaganda is environmental and invisible. The total life of any culture tends to be "propaganda", for this reason. It blankets perception and supresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom. (p.77)"

"All media of communications are cliches serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns of associations and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness."

"Another theme of the Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is "pastimes are past times". The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the twentieth century the number of past times that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of doubleness and interplay since this kind of hendiadys-dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy. (p.99)"

"Disarmament is illogical and futile, unless one is prepared to regard the available means of production and social organization as affording unique social ends. To divert electrical energy and circuitry into atomic bombs shows the same imaginative power as wiring the dining-room chairs to enable one to electrocute the sitter in the event that he might prove hostile. It is part of the age-old habit of using new means for old purposes instead of discovering what are the new goals contained in the new means. (p.202)"

"World War I was a railway war of centralism and encirclement. World War II was a radio war of decentralism. World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation. (p.66)"

"The newspaper is a corporate symbolist poem, environmental and invisible, as poem."

"Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information."

"The telegraph press mosaic is acoustic space as much as an electric circus."

"Acoustic space is totally discontinuous, like touch. It is a sphere without centers or margins."

"One touch of nature makes the whole world tin."

"Privacy invasion is now one of biggest knowledge industries. (p. 24)"

"The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture. (p. 168)"

"Chinese script is not visual but iconic and tactile. It does not disturb the tribal bonds. (p. 72)"

"The only cool PR is provided by one's enemies. They toil incessantly and for free. (88)"

"When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments. (p. 180)"

"Tactility is space of the interval."

"Visual space is the space of detachment. Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. (p. 194)"

"Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. We lose "touch" without it. Visual space is the space of detachment."

"The existential trauma had a physical basis in the first electric extension of our nervous system."

"The Concept of Dread, by Soren Kierkegaard, appeared in 1844, first year of the commercial telegraph...It mentions the telegraph as a reason for dread and nowness or existenz."

"The Eskimo, like any pre-literate, leaps easily from the Paleolithic stone age to the electric age, by-passing the Neolithic specialism."

"As the totem pole is tied to the lineality of the missionaries' Bible, so the igloo was made possible by the primus stove."

"Since Sputnik, the earth has been wrapped in a dome-like blanket or bubble. Nature ended."

"Cartoons drove the photo back to myth and dream screen."

"Color is not so much a visual as a tactile medium."

"The young are really the heirs to a generation of incompetence."

"In this book we turn to the study of new patterns of energy arising from man’s physical and psychic artifacts and social organizations. The only method for perceiving process and pattern is by inventory of effects obtained by the comparison and contrast of developing situations. (p. 8)"

"Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature. (p. 11)"

"By involving all men in all men, by the electric extension of their own nervous systems, the new technology turns the figure of the primitive society into a universal ground that buries all previous figures. (p. 25)"

"Paradox is the technique for seizing the conflicting aspects of any problem. Paradox coalesces or telescopes various facets of a complex process in a single instant. (p. 106)"

"Every process pushed far enough tends to reverse or flip suddenly. Chiasmus – the reversal to process caused by increasing its speed, scope or size. (p. 6)"

"New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers. (p. 47)"

"Marx shared with economists then and since the inability to make his concepts include innovational processes. It is one thing to spot a new product but quite another to observe the invisible new environments generated by the action of the product on a variety of pre-existing social grounds. (p. 63)"

"Environments work us over and remake us. It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things. (p. 90)"