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.

People never remember but the computer never forgets.

Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a manmade environment that ends "Nature" and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed.

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

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

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

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.

The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.

The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world.

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

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.

Manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication as performance.

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 present is always invisible because it's environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.

The press is a group confessional form that provides communal participation. The book is a private confessional form that provides a "point of view."

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

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

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

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.

In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.

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.

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.

Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class.

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

People in new environments always produce the new preceptual modality without any difficulty or awareness of change. It is later that the psychic and social realignments baffle societies.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

It is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behaviour.

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

Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes.

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

The "interface" of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism - a formula for blitz and metamorphosis.

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.

Native societies did not think of themselves as being in the world as occupants but considered that their rituals created the world and keep it operational.

The "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.

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

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

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.