Quotes
The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message. (p. 8)
Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perception...When these ratios change, men change.
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)
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)
It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. (p. 9)
All media exists to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values. (p. 199)
The "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. (p. 8)
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)
