All Quotes

"Typography extended its character to the regulation and fixations of languages. (p. 260)"

"Print altered not only the spelling and grammar but the accentuation and inflection of languages, and made “bad grammar” possible. (p. 263)"

"The levelling of inflexion and of wordplay became part of the program of applied knowledge in the seventeenth century. (p. 265)"

"Print created national uniformity and government centralism, but also individualism and opposition to government as such. (p. 267)"

"Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society. (p. 271)"

"The reduction of the tactile qualities of life and language constitute the refinement sought in the Renaissance and repudiated now in the electronic age. (p. 272)"

"Philosophy was as naive as science in its unconscious acceptance of the assumptions or dynamic of typography. (p. 278)"

"Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave. (p. 280)"

"Typography cracked the voices of silence. (p. 283)"

"The Gutenberg galaxy was theoretically dissolved in 1905 with the discovery of curved space, but in practice it had been invaded by the telegraph two generations before that. (p. 286)"

"Sheer visual quantity evokes the magical resonance of the tribal hoard. The box office looms as a return to the echo chamber of bardic incantation. (p. 288)"

"All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information. (p. 178-179)"

"The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age."

"Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols."

"The present volume to this point might be regarded as a gloss on a single text of Harold Innis: "The effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century.""

"There is nothing willful or arbitrary about the Innis mode of expression. Were it to be translated into perspective prose, it would not only require huge space, but the insight into the modes of interplay among forms of organisation would also be lost. Innis sacrificed point of view and prestige to his sense of the urgent need for insight. A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding. As Innis got more insight he abandoned any mere point of view in his presentation of knowledge. When he interrelates the development of the steam press with 'the consolidation of the vernaculars' and the rise of nationalism and revolution he is not reporting anybody's point of view, least of all his own. He is setting up a mosaic configuration or galaxy for insight … Innis makes no effort to "spell out" the interrelations between the components in his galaxy. He offers no consumer packages in his later work, but only do-it-yourself kits..."

"The medium is the message."

"In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner. (p. 4)"

"It is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behaviour."

"It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. (p. 9)"

"We are as numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture. (p. 9)"

"If the criminal appears as a nonconformist who is unable to meet the demand of technology that we behave in uniform and continuous patterns, literate man is quite inclined to see others who cannot conform as somewhat. (p. 31)"

"War is never anything less than accelerated technological change. (p. 102)"

"Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status. (p. 133)"

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

"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)"

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

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

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

"We live invested in an electric information environment that is quite as imperceptible to us as water is to fish. (p. 5)"

"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)"

"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)"

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

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

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

"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)"

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

"The hot radio medium used in cool or nonliterate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment. (p. 30)"

"Radio comes to us ostensibly with person to person directness that is private and intimate, while in more urgent fact, it is really a subliminal echo chamber of magic power to touch remote and forgotten chords. (p. 302)."

"Today, computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. (p. 80)"

"The mosaic form of the TV image demands participation and involvement in depth, of the whole being, as does the sense of touch. (p. 334)"

"A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters. (p. 245)"

"Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village size and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumour, and personal malice. (p. 24)"

"Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of "what the public wants" played over its own nerves. (p. 68)"

"Art is anything you can get away with."

"Literate man, civilized man, tends to restrict and to separate functions, whereas tribal man has freely extended the form of his body to include the universe. (p. 117)"

"Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society."

"Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener. That is the immediate aspect of radio. A private experience. The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber. (p. 261)"

"The message of radio is one of violent, unified implosion and resonance. (p. 263)"