We now live in a technologically prepared environment that blankets the earth itself. The humanly contrived environment of electric information and p… - Marshall McLuhan

All of man's artefacts, whether hardware or software, whether bulldozers or laws of chemistry, are alike linguistic in structure and intent. (p. 227)

The private sponge and the collective sponge, both reaching out for their rations of sensation, achieved a horrible distinctness and clarity that matched the raw power of the predatory army machine. With the cutting-off of the supplies of papyrus by the Mohammedans, the Mediterranean, long a Roman lake, became a Muslim lake, and the Roman center collapsed. What had been the margins of this center-margin structure became independent centers on a new feudal, structural base. The Roman center collapsed by the fifth century a.d. as wheel, road, and paper dwindled into a ghostly paradigm of former power.

Our time is a time to cross barriers, for erasing old categories — for probing around. When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised, put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result