Each new technology is a reprogramming of sensory life. (p. 33) - Marshall McLuhan

As forms, as media, the book and the newspaper would seem to be as incompatible as any two media could be. The owners of media always endeavor to give the public what it wants, because they sense that their power is in the medium and not in the message or the program.

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)

The power of the arts to anticipate future social and technological developments, by a generation and more, has long been recognized. In this century Ezra Pound called the artist “the antennae of the race.” Art as radar acts as “an early alarm system,” as it were, enabling us to discover social and psychic targets in lots of time to prepare to cope with them. This concept of the arts as prophetic, contrasts with the popular idea of them as mere self-expression. If art is an “early warning system,” to use the phrase from World War II, when radar was new, art has the utmost relevance not only to media study but to the development of media controls.