33 quotes
Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes. (p. 36)
Understanding Media (1964)
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)
Understanding Media (1964)
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)
Understanding Media (1964)
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)
Understanding Media (1964)
We are numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture. (p. 16)
Understanding Media (1964)
We are as numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture. (p. 9)
Understanding Media (1964)
The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message. (p. 8)
Understanding Media (1964)
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)
Understanding Media (1964)
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)
Understanding Media (1964)
In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin. (p. 47)
Understanding Media (1964)
All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information. (p. 178-179)
Understanding Media (1964)
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).
Understanding Media (1964)
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.
Understanding Media (1964)