In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.

Does the interiorization of media such as letters alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes?

Primitivism has become the vulgar cliche of much modern art and speculation.

A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various externalizations of our senses.

When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized.

African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film.

Non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training.

Literacy affects the physiology as well as the psychic life of the African.

What began as a "Romantic reaction" towards organic wholeness may or may not have hastened the discovery of electro-magnetic waves. But certainly the electro-magnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous "field" in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under conditions of a "global village." We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums. So that concern with the "primitive" today is as banal as nineteenth-century concern with "progress," and as irrelevant to our problems. The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world.

Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.

The mother tongue is propaganda.

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.

Poetry and the arts can't exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind.

There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation.

The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action.

The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication...is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts.

Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.

Human perception is literally incarnation.

Nobody can doubt that the entire range of applied science contributes to the very format of a newspaper. But the headline is a feature which began with the Napoleonic Wars. The headline is a primitive shout of rage, triumph, fear, or warning, and newspapers have thrived on wars ever since.

Even pacifist agitation or the nation-wide fever of big sports competitions acts as a spur to war fever in circumstances like ours. Any kind of excitement or emotion contributes to the possibility of dangerous explosions when the feelings of huge populations are kept inflamed even in peacetime for the sake of the advancement of commerce. Headlines mean street sales. It takes emotion to move merchandise. And wars and rumors of wars are the merchandise and also the emotion of the popular press.

The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods.

Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception.

For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.

Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.

When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.

New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.

The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces.

My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy - the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the USA.

The method of the twentieth century is to use not single but multiple models for experimental exploration - the technique of the suspended judgement.

It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV.

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.

Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes.

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

All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Art is anything you can get away with.

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.

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 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.

The message of radio is one of violent, unified implosion and resonance.

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.

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.