The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across ...the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudoevents, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century--sex and paranoia.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 »
As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been erod...ed by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Neither the historian nor the cartographer can ever reproduce the reality they are trying to communicate to the reader of books or... maps; they can but give a plan, a series of indications, of this reality. There are contrasting schemes for choosing from enormous numbers of geographic details. You may have a map in which every feature that can be named, every hill, brook, crossroads, is crowded in; or you may have a map in which many details are omitted in the effort to show the reader the lay of the land, the shape of the mountain systems, the relations of drainage, relief, communications, and so on. Both kinds are useful, depending on the needs of the user.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercia...ls, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator--the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value, counts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experie...nce of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquest, "I want you to love her, too!" It is a jealous passion also. He feels a little indignant if he finds that any one else has discovered the book, too.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how t...o employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I wish not to be given a title or an appointed position. I can and will do more good if I were made a Federal Agent at Large, and ...I will help best by doing it my way through my communications with people of all ages. First and Foremost I am an entertainer but all I need is the Federal Credentials.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are some things which a man never speaks of, which are much finer kept silent about. To the highest communications we only l...end a silent ear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I am to be a thoroughfare, I prefer that it be of the mountain brooks, the Parnassian streams, and not the town sewers. There i...s inspiration, that gossip which comes to the ear of the attentive mind from the courts of heaven. There is the profane and stale revelation of the barroom and the police court. The same ear is fitted to receive both communications. Only the character of the hearer determines to which it shall be open, and to which closed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »