media theory

technical change alters not only habits of life, but patterns of thought and valuation,

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.

War and the fear of war have always been considered the main incentives to technological extension of our bodies.

Print created individualism and nationalism in the sixteenth century.

Today, when we have extended all parts of our bodies and senses by technology, we are haunted by the need for an outer consensus of technology and experience that would raise our communal lives to the level of a world-wide consensus. When we have achieved a world-wide fragmentation, it is not unnatural to think about a world-wide integration.

To behold, use or perceive any extension of ourselves in technological form is necessarily to embrace it.

As work is replaced by the sheer movement of information, money as a store of work merges with the informational forms of credit and credit card. From coin to paper currency, and from currency to credit card there is a steady progression toward commercial exchange as the movement of information itself.

Just as speech lost its magic with writing, and further with printing, when printed money supplanted gold, the compelling aura of it disappeared.

The capitulation of Western man to his technology, with its crescendo of specialized demands, has always appeared to many observers of our world as a kind of enslavement