Quotes About Culture

The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them.

How does a culture change when new technologies are introduced to it? And is it always desirable for a culture to accommodate itself to the demands of new technologies?

Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances.

Stated in the most dramatic terms, the accusation can be made that the uncontrolled growth of technology destroys the vital sources of our humanity. It creates a culture without a moral foundation. It undermines certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living. Technology, in sum, is both friend and enemy.

Amusing Ourselves to Death is a call to action. It is, in my father's words, "an inquiry ... and a lamentation," yes, but it aspires to greater things. It is an exhortation to do something. It's a counterpunch to what my father thought daily TV news was: "inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.

The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture.

Lo mejor de la televisión es su basura y nadie ni nada está seriamente amenazado por ella. Porque no medimos una cultura por su producción de trivialidades no encubiertas, sino por lo que juzga significativo.

Tüketici psikodramalarla yat??t?r?lan bir hastad?r.

Creo que la epistemología creada por la televisión no sólo es inferior a la epistemología basada en la imprenta, sino que es peligrosa y absurda.

Los estadounidenses ya no hablan entre sí, sino que se entretienen recíprocamente. No intercambian ideas, sino imágenes.

Stated in the most dramatic terms, the accusation can be made that the uncontrolled growth of technology destroys the vital sources of our humanity. It creates a culture without a moral foundation. It undermines certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living.

Todo nuestro pasado nos ha preparado para reconocer y resistir una prisión cuando las rejas empiezan a cerrarse detrás de nosotros. Nos alzamos en armas contra estos problemas. Pero ¿qué si no se sienten gritos de angustia? ¿Quién está preparado para luchar contra un mar de diversiones? ¿A quién y cuándo nos quejamos, y en qué tono de voz, cuando un discurso serio se disuelve en risas estúpidas?

The new focus on the image undermined traditional definitions of information, of news, and, to a large extent, of reality itself.

Surrounding every technology are institutions whose organization — not to mention their reason for being — reflects the world-view promoted by the technology. Therefore, when an old technology is assaulted by a new one, institutions are threatened. When institutions are threatened, a culture finds itself in crisis.

It is my intention in this book to show that a great media-metaphor shift has taken place in America, with the result that the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense.

Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned. It must appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged, which is a way of saying that the "truth" is a kind of cultural prejudice. Each culture conceives of it as being most authentically expressed in certain symbolic forms that another culture may regard as trivial or irrelevant.

We know enough about language to understand that variations in the structures of languages will result in variations in what may be called "world view." How people think about time and space, and about things and processes, will be greatly influenced by the grammatical features of their language.

Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian. It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment.

In courtrooms, classrooms, operating rooms, board rooms, churches and even airplanes, Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other.

In tabulating the cost of technological progress, Freud takes a rather depressing line, that of a man who agrees with Thoreau's remark that our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end.

Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?

The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products.