Understanding Media

on an adult, and offsets the effect before it happens.

And a technological extension of our bodies designed to alleviate physical stress can bring on psychic stress that may be much worse.

“technology is explicitness.”

Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world recipro

goes far to explain why man is impelled to extend various parts of his body by a kind of autoamputation.

Benda saw that the artists and intellectuals who had long been alienated from power, and who since Voltaire had been in opposition, had now been drafted for service in the highest echelons of decision-making. Their great betrayal was that they had surrendered their autonomy and had become the flunkies of power, as the atomic physicist at the presen

Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. Man must serve his electric technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all other extens

saturation with Roman values,

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.