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The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.
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A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space. (p. 73)
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At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology. (p. 300)
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Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic. (p. 84)
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The portability of the book, like that of the easel-painting, added much to the new culture of individualism. (p. 233)
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All words, in every language, are metaphors.
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The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography. The printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, created extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly. (p. 23)
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Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of 'what the public wants' played over its own nerves. (p. 68)
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By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.
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The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.
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Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure but metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing in terms of another. (p. 298)
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Cultural dominance by either the left or the right hemisphere is largely dependent upon environmental factors.
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At the very high speed of living, everybody needs a new career and a new job and a totally new personality every ten years.
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Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension.
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The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators. (p. 205)
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Print altered not only the spelling and grammar but the accentuation and inflection of languages, and made 'bad grammar' possible. (p. 263)
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Pornography and obscenity...work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground - situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks.
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Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. We lose 'touch' without it. Visual space is the space of detachment.
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All media of communications are cliches serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns of associations and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness.
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War has become the environment of our time if only because it is an accelerated form of innovation and education. (p. 381)
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The nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images. (p. 360)
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Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog. (p. 48)
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We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation. (xx)
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Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.