Understanding Media

Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. One of the merits of motivation research has been the revelation of man's sex relation to the motorcar. (p.46)

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

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

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)

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

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

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)

A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor? (p.7)

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly. (p.73 of the 1966 Signet paperback edition)

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).

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)

The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy. (p. 154)

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)

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

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

Art is anything you can get away with.

If we sit and talk in a dark room, words suddenly acquire new meanings and different textures...and on the radio. Given only the sound of a play, we have to fill in all of the senses, not just the sight of the action. So much do-it-yourself, or completion and “closure” of action, develops a kind of independent isolation in the young that makes them remote and inaccessible.” (p. 264)

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

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 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)

Although the medium is the message, the controls go beyond programming. The restraints are always directed to the “content,” which is always another medium. The content of the press is literary statement, as the content of the book is speech, and the content of the movie is the novel. So the effects of radio are quite independent of its programming. (p. 267)

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)

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

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)

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)

Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes. (p. 36)

At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology. (p. 300)

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)

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

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)

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

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

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)

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

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

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 medium is the message.