Understanding Media

With such awareness, the subliminal life, private and social, has been hoicked up into full view, with the result that we have “social consciousness” presented to us as a cause of guilt-feelings. Existentialism offers a philosophy of structures, rather than categories, and of total social involvement instead of the bourgeois spirit of individual se

While the arts as radar feedback provide a dynamic and changing corporate image, their purpose may be not to enable us to change but rather to maintain an even course toward permanent goals,

media are high in participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone.

This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image.

The principle of numbness comes into play with electric technology, as with any other. We have to numb our central nervous system when it is extended and exposed, or we will die. Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of

If Perceptive Organs vary, Objects of Perception seem to vary: If Perceptive Organs close, their Objects seem to close also.

Plato, in all his striving to imagine an ideal training school, failed to notice that Athens was a greater school than any university even he could dream up.

the “technique of the suspended judgment” goes further. It anticipates the effect of, say, an unhappy childhood

is not an exaggeration to say that the future of modern society and the stability of its inner life depend in large part on the maintenance of an equilibrium between the strength of the techniques of communication and the capacity of the individual’s own reaction.