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)
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)
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).
All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information. (p. 178-179)
The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy. (p. 154)
Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes. (p. 36)
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)
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.”
Go Premium
Support Quotewise while enjoying an ad-free experience and premium features.
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.