Great ages of innovation are the ages in which entire cultures are junked or scrapped.

Paradox is the technique for seizing the conflicting aspects of any problem. Paradox coalesces or telescopes various facets of a complex process in a single instant.

For me any of the little gestures I make are all tentative probes. That's why I feel free to make them sound as outrageous or extreme as possible. Until you make it extreme, the probe is not very efficient.

World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.

At the very high speed of living, everybody needs a new career and a new job and a totally new personality every ten years.

It is always the psychic and social grounds, brought into play by each medium or technology, that readjust the balance of the hemispheres and of human sensibilities into equilibrium with those grounds.

Cartoons drove the photo back to myth and dream screen.

The public has yet to see TV as TV. Broadcasters have no awareness of its potential. The movie people are just beginning to get a grasp on film.

Although meaningless in a tribal context, numbers and statistics assume mythic and magical qualities of infallibility in literate societies.

Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses.

The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.

The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.

At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.

Every process pushed far enough tends to reverse or flip suddenly. Chiasmus - the reversal to process caused by increasing its speed, scope or size.

All words at every level of prose and poetry and all devices of language and speech derive their meaning from figure / ground relation.

The newspaper is a corporate symbolist poem, environmental and invisible, as poem.

Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension.

Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.

Color is not so much a visual as a tactile medium.

The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer.

The new overkill is simply an extension of our nervous system into a total ecological service environment. Such a service environment can liquidate or terminate its beneficiaries as naturally as it sustains them.

The audience, as ground, shapes and controls the work of art.

Chinese script is not visual but iconic and tactile. It does not disturb the tribal bonds.

All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody.

Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.

New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers.

By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.

Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information.

Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures - it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.

The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.

The young are really the heirs to a generation of incompetence.

The meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience. The content of new situations, both private and corporate, is typically the preceding situation.

The "tragic flaw" is not a detail of characterization, a mere "fly in the ointment", but a structural feature of ordinary consciousness.

World War I a railway war of centralization and encirclement. World War II a radio war of decentralization concluded by the Bomb. World War III a TV guerrilla war with no divisions between civil and military fronts.

Newton, and 'proper scientific method' after him, conducted attention to 'continuous description' of experimental phenomena instead of to causes.

The only cool PR is provided by one's enemies. They toil incessantly and for free.

Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.

The media themselves are the avant-garde of our society. Avant-garde no longer exists in painting, music and poetry, it's the media themselves.

Marx shared with economists then and since the inability to make his concepts include innovational processes. It is one thing to spot a new product but quite another to observe the invisible new environments generated by the action of the product on a variety of pre-existing social grounds.

The pre-atomist multisensory void was an animate, pulsating, and moving vibrant interval, neither container nor contained, acoustic space penetrated by tactility.

The telegraph press mosaic is acoustic space as much as an electric circus.

Invention is the mother of all necessities.

In tetrad form, the artefact is seen to be not netural or passive, but an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground.

In this book we turn to the study of new patterns of energy arising from man's physical and psychic artifacts and social organizations. The only method for perceiving process and pattern is by inventory of effects obtained by the comparison and contrast of developing situations.

Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.

All media of communications are cliches serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns of associations and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness.

The automated presidential surrogate is the superlative nobody.

While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.

When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments.

Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.