Our technology forces us to live mythically

I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

We have to find the environments in which it will be possible to live with our new inventions.

Technology is that which separates us from our environment.

We have be-come irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.

Gramophone and movies were merely the mechanization of speech and gesture. But the radio and TV were not just the electronification of speech and gesture but the electronification of the entire range of human personal expressiveness. With electronification the flow is taken out of the wire and into the vacuum tube circuit, which confers freedom and flexibility such as are in metaphor and in words themselves.

New media may at first appear as mere codes of transmission for older achievement and established patterns of thought. But nobody could make the mistake of supposing that phonetic writing merely made it possible for the Greeks to set down in visual order what they had though and known before writing. In the same way printing made literature possible. It did not merely encode literature.