People don't actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath. (p. 184) - Marshall McLuhan

When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.

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)

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