Sublime

McLuhan said other communication theories studied transportation, while he studied transformation—what happens to people using media. Media ecology is a reversal of communication theories: they study what people do with media; media ecology studies what media do to people.

This has set up the current culture clash between People of the Book and People of the Screen.

Robert Wright predicted one of its most important consequences. In his essay “Voice of America,” which appeared in the September 13, 1993, issue of the magazine the New Republic, Wright reported on his forays into Usenet, a set of online discussion groups

If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist’s couch.

what Marshall McLuhan used to call “rear-view mirror” thinking: the assumption that a new medium is merely an extension or amplification of an older one;

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.

all forms of employment become “paid learning,”