media theory

The artist picks up the message of cultural and technological challenge decades before its transforming impact occurs.

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.

Literacy creates very much simpler kinds of people than those that develop in the complex web of ordinary tribal and oral societies.

the man in a literate and homogenized society ceases to be sensitive to the diverse and discontinuous life of forms. He acquires the illusion of the third dimension and the “private point of view” as part of his Narcissus fixation, and is quite shut off from Blake’s awareness or that of the Psalmist, that we become what we behold.

Print created individualism and nationalism in the sixteenth century.

Oral cultures act and react at the same time. Phonetic culture endows men with the means of repressing their feelings and emotions when engaged in action.

Western man acquired from the technology of literacy the power to act without reacting

the invention of Euclidean space is, itself, a direct result of the action of the phonetic alphabet on the human senses.