Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his destiny that awaits for him, nor his ow...n death, but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him something absolutely arbitrary.... He is in a state of radical emergency, of virtual extermination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Computers were originally just supposed to be number-crunchers, but now their number-crunching has been harnessed in a thousand im...aginative ways to create new virtual machines, such as video games and word processors, in which the underlying number-crunching is almost invisible, and in which new powers seem quite magical. Our brains, similarly, weren't designed (except for some very recent peripheral organs) for word processing, but now a large portion--perhaps even the lion's share--of the activity that takes place in adult human brains is involved in a sort of word processing: speech production and comprehension, and the serial rehearsal and rearrangement of linguistic items, or better, their neural surrogates. And these activities magnify and transform the underlying hardware powers in ways that seem (from the "outside") quite magical.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Tragedy dramatizes human life as potentiality and fulfillment. Its virtual future, or Destiny, is therefore quite different from t...hat created in comedy. Comic Destiny is Fortune--what the world will bring, and the man will take or miss, encounter or escape; tragic Destiny is what the man brings, and the world will demand of him. That is his Fate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In written communication, the imagination converts codes into a version of reality, and the mind reasons its way to judgments, con...victions, and actions. With television, by contrast, movement, sound, and color rush experiences directly to the senses. The process moves from image to impression, to emotional impulse, and then to action. Sensation and emotional intensity dominate. The reflection and reasoning which verbal communication demand are bypassed. Another profound difference between television and writing is the way they collect and disseminate knowledge. Television absorbs the scenes within the range of its lenses, records the images, then diffuses them like a gas. It creates the illusion of reproducing life in its natural, multidimensional state. Lan guages, by contrast, convert life into artificial codes and organize them into artificial patterns.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One will meet, for example, the virtual assumption that what is relative to thought cannot be real. But why not, exactly? Red is r...elative to sight, but the fact that this or that is in that relation to vision that we call being red is not itself relative to sight; it is a real fact.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual, delays, but which can at any moment bec...ome what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted, atrocious.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
These people figured video was the Lord's preferred means of communicating, the screen itself a kind of perpetually burning bush. ..."He's in the de-tails," Sublett had said once. "You gotta watch for Him close."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There were metal detectors on the staff-room doors and Hernandez usually had a drawer full of push-daggers, nunchuks, stun-guns, k...nucks, boot-knives, and whatever else the detectors had picked up. Like Friday morning at a South Miami high school.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »