First we shape our tools, thereafter they shape us

The movie stars and matinee idols are put into the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes.

Television is teaching all the time. Does more educating than the schools and all the institutions of higher learning.

Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy.

When information rubs against information the results are startling and effective. The perrenial quest for involvement, fill-in, takes many forms.

My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.