Television was far more pervasive and radicalizing than printing had been. It was massive. When Riesman and others spoke of books,... magazines, and radio as mass media, they could not imagine the size and shape of television. There never had been a medium that could reach everybody, and reach them with images of behavior as behavior without the rationalization of words. The audience for its programs was drawn from every social class and every social element. By the mere act of watching television, a heterogeneous society could engage in a purely homogeneous activity. Television images are more rapid and transient than the printed word. They make no demand on us to remember or reflect on them. This impermanence and the time of consumption cause us to spend extended hours with the medium but significantly less time with any one image or sequence of images. Television is instantaneous and simultaneous: Everyone gets the message at the same time and, at the same time that an event is happening. There is no lag time between a reporter witnessing an event and reporting it, and no time for reflection and analysis.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by the electric media--movies, Telstar, flight--far surpasses... any possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communicatio...n.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the... movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in "high definition." High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, "high definition." A cartoon is "low definition," simply because very little visual information is provided. Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People are more likely to search for specific books in which they are actively interested and that justify all of that effort of r...eading them. Electronic images and sounds, however, thrust themselves into people's environments, and the messages are received with little effort. In a sense, people must go after print messages, but electronic messages reach out and touch people. People will expose themselves to information in electronic media that they would never bother to read about in a book.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I believe that organic sex, body against body, skin area against skin area, is becoming no longer possible, simply because if anyt...hing is to have any meaning for us it must take place in terms of the values and experiences of the media landscape.... What we're getting is a whole new order of sexual fantasies, involving a different order of experiences, like car crashes, like travelling in jet aircraft, the whole overlay of new technologies, architecture, interior design, communications, transport, merchandising. These things are beginning to reach into our lives and change the interior design of our sexual fantasies. We've got to recognize that what one sees through the window of the TV screen is as important as what one sees through a window on the street.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Freud thought he was bringing the plague to the U.S.A., but the U.S.A. has victoriously resisted the psychoanalytical frost by rea...l deep freezing, by mental and sexual refrigeration. They have countered the black magic of the Unconscious with the white magic of "doing your own thing," air conditioning, sterilization, mental frigidity and the cold media of information.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that partic...ular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters--there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void.... That's why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of the presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that cri...tical opinion is often orphaned in the present.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Today the discredit of words is very great. Most of the time the media transmit lies. In the face of an intolerable world, words a...ppear to change very little. State power has become congenitally deaf, which is why--but the editorialists forget it--terrorists are reduced to bombs and hijacking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »