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As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village. Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree.
This older environment was elevated to an art form by the new mechanical environment.
For TV has provided a new environment of low visual orientation and high involvement that makes accommodation to our older educational establishment quite difficult.
the personal and social consequences of any medium — that is, of any extension of ourselves — result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. Thus, with automation, for example, the new patterns of human association tend to eliminate jobs, it is true.
The restructuring of human work and association was shaped by the technique of fragmentation that is the essence of machine technology.
For the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.
“the medium is the message” because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.
The message of the movie medium is that of transition from lineal connections to configurations.
Since understanding stops action, as Nietzsche observed, we can moderate the fierceness of this conflict by understanding the media that extend us and raise these wars within and without us.
Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the “content” of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.
The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.
more than two hundred years of seclusion.” Money has reorganized the sense life of peoples just because it is an extension of our sense lives.
Print created individualism and nationalism in the sixteenth century. Program and “content” analysis offer no clues to the magic of these media or to their subliminal charge.
hot medium is one that extends one single sense in “high definition.” High definition is the state of being well filled with data.
Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.
Were we to accept fully and directly every shock to our various structures of awareness, we would soon be nervous wrecks, doing double-takes and pressing panic buttons every minute.
For many people, this cooling system brings on a life-long state of psychic rigor mortis, or of somnambulism, particularly observable in periods of new technology.
Specialist technologies detribalize. The nonspecialist electric technology retribalizes.
But the concentric with its endless intersection of planes is necessary for insight. In fact, it is the technique of insight, and as such is necessary for media study, since no medium has its meaning or existence alone, but only in constant interplay with other media.
It is like our contemporary consciousness of the Unconscious.
It was Julien Benda’s Great Betrayal that helped to clarify the new situation in which the intellectual suddenly holds the whip hand in society. 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 present moment is the flunky of the war lords.
One effect of the static photo had been to suppress the conspicuous consumption of the rich, but the effect of the speedup of the photo had been to provide fantasy riches for the poor of the entire globe.
With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself.
Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body.
It is this continuous embrace of our own technology in daily use that puts us in the Narcissus role of subliminal awareness and numbness in relation to these images of ourselves.
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.
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 apathy.
Wedded as they are to nineteenth-century industrial technology as the basis of class liberation, nothing could be more subversive of the Marxian dialectic than the idea that linguistic media shape social development, as much as do the means of production.
Our private and corporate lives have become information processes just because we have put our central nervous systems outside us in electric technology.
In a word, the message of the electric light is total change. It is pure information without any content to restrict its transforming and informing power.
If the student of media will but meditate on the power of this medium of electric light to transform every structure of time and space and work and society that it penetrates or contacts, he will have the key to the form of the power that is in all media to reshape any lives that they touch.
Owners are aware of the media as power, and they know that this power has little to do with “content” or the media within the media.
What I am saying is that media as extensions of our senses institute new ratios, not only among our private senses, but among themselves, when they interact among themselves.
the strategy of the stock market speculators. It is all capsulated in the popular variant on Robert Browning: “A man’s reach must exceed his grasp or what’s a metaphor.” All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms.
We mean that we can translate more and more of ourselves into other forms of expression that exceed ourselves.
will be translated into information systems. 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 extensions of his physical organs.
The “common sense” was for many centuries held to be the peculiar human power of translating one kind of experience of one sense into all the senses, and presenting the result continuously as a unified image to the mind.
Those who are concerned with the program “content” of media and not with the medium proper, appear to be in the position of physicians who ignore the “syndrome of just being sick.”
And a technological extension of our bodies designed to alleviate physical stress can bring on psychic stress that may be much worse.
This power of technology to create its own world of demand is not independent of technology being first an extension of our own bodies and senses.
Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.
Only the dedicated artist seems to have the power for encountering the present actuality.
The literate man or society develops the tremendous power of acting in any matter with considerable detachment from the feelings or emotional involvement that a nonliterate man or society would experience.
Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.
The easier alphabet and the light, cheap, transportable papyrus together effected the transfer of power from the priestly to the military class.
It is in its power to extend patterns of visual uniformity and continuity that the “message” of the alphabet is felt by cultures.
The term “communication” has had an extensive use in connection with roads and bridges, sea routes, rivers, and canals, even before it became transformed into “information movement” in the electric age. Perhaps there is no more suitable way of defining the character of the electric age than by first studying the rise of the idea of transportation as communication, and then the transition of the idea from transport to information by means of electricity.
Each form of transport not only carries, but translates and transforms the sender, the receiver, and the message. The use of any kind of medium or extension of man alters the patterns of interdependence among people, as it alters the ratios among our senses.
Nietzsche said understanding stops action, and men of action seem to have an intuition of the fact in their shunning the dangers of comprehension.
Today the acceleration tends to be total, and thus ends space as the main factor in social arrangements.
