Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation.

There are no connections in resonant space. There are only interfaces and metamorphoses.

I am a pattern watcher.

While people are engaged in creating a totally different world, they always form vivid images of the preceding world.

It is perhaps typical of very creative minds that they hit very large nails not quite on the head.

There is no connection between the elements in an electric world, which is equivalent to being surrounded by the human unconscious.

Man in the electronic age has no possible environment except the globe and no possible occupation except information-gathering.

The sculptural qualities of the image dim down the purely personal identity.

The electronic age is a world in which causes and effects become almost interchangeable, as in music structures.

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.

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.