The news automatically becomes the real world for the TV user and is not a substitute for reality, but is itself an immediate reality.

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

You see, Dad, Professor McLuhan says that the environment that man creates becomes his medium for defining his role in it. The invention of type created linear, or sequential thought, separating thought from action. Now, with TV and folk singing, thought and action are closer and social involvement is greater. We again live in a village. Get it?

The new is always made up of the old, or rather, what people see in the new is always the old thing. The rear-view mirror. The future of the future is the present, and this is something that people are terrified of.

The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.

For those for whom the sex act has come to seem mechanical and merely the meeting and manipulation of body parts, there often remains a hunger which can be called metaphysical but which is not recognized as such, and which seeks satisfaction in physical danger, or sometimes in torture, suicide, or murder.