We now live in a technologically prepared environment that blankets the earth itself. The humanly contrived environment of electric information and power has begun to take precedence over the old environment of "nature." Nature, as it were, begins to be the content of our technology.

Environments work us over and remake us. It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things.

The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos - resonant utterance or word.

Acoustic space is totally discontinuous, like touch. It is a sphere without centers or margins.

Each of our senses makes its own space, but no sense can function in isolation. Only as sight relates the touch, or kinaesthesia, or sound, can the eye see.

Interface, of the resonant interval as 'where the action is', whether chemical, psychic or social, involves touch.

Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature.

The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community.

Another theme of the Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is "pastimes are past times". The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the twentieth century the number of past times that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of doubleness and interplay since this kind of hendiadys-dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy.

In Catch-22, the figure of the black market and the ground of war merge into a monster presided over by the syndicate. When war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood.

Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.

Visual space is the space of detachment. Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement.

The hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light.

The unformulated message of an assembly of news items from every quarter of the globe is that the world today is one city. All war is civil war. All suffering is our own.

Only puny secrets need protection. Big secrets are protected by public incredulity. You can actually dissipate a situation by giving it maximal coverage. As to alarming people, that's done by rumours, not by coverage.

Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration.

One touch of nature makes the whole world tin.

At the speed of light there is no sequence; everything happens at the same instant.

The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.

By involving all men in all men, by the electric extension of their own nervous systems, the new technology turns the figure of the primitive society into a universal ground that buries all previous figures.

I am not a "culture critic" because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world.

Disarmament is illogical and futile, unless one is prepared to regard the available means of production and social organization as affording unique social ends. To divert electrical energy and circuitry into atomic bombs shows the same imaginative power as wiring the dining-room chairs to enable one to electrocute the sitter in the event that he might prove hostile. It is part of the age-old habit of using new means for old purposes instead of discovering what are the new goals contained in the new means.

The coverage is the war. If there were no coverage, there'd be no war. Yes, the newsmen and the mediamen around the world are actually the fighters, not the soldiers anymore.

Cultural dominance by either the left or the right hemisphere is largely dependent upon environmental factors.

Since Sputnik, the earth has been wrapped in a dome-like blanket or bubble. Nature ended.

The literate man is a sucker for propaganda...You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas.

Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly.

Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.

Privacy invasion is now one of biggest knowledge industries.

TV is not good at covering single events. It needs a ritual, a rhythm, and a pattern...[TV] tends to fosters patterns rather than events.

Older cliches are retrieved both as inherent principles that inform the new ground and new awareness, and as archetypal nostalgia figures with transformed meaning in relation to the new ground.

The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature.

Pornography and obscenity...work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground -- situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks.

The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the ground rules of the environment. The ground rules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serves as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware.

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

By surpassing writing, we have regained our wholeness, not on a national or cultural but cosmic plane.

Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.

Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.

The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.

The discarnate TV user lives in a world between fantasy and dream, and is in a typically hypnotic state, which is the ultimate form and level of participation.

Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.

In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.

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.

Gutenberg made all history available as classified data: the transportable book brought the world of the dead into the space of the gentlemen's library; the telegraph brought the entire world of the living to the workman's breakfast table.

Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.

All media are extensions of some human faculty -- psychic or physical.

Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today.

The stock market was created by the telegraph and the telephone, and its panics are engineered by carefully orchestrated stories in the press.

The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie.

The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property.