Quotes About Communication

With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.

How delighted would be all the kings, czars and führers of the past (and commissars of the present) to know that censorship is not a necessity when all political discourse takes the form of a jest.

As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.

In a print-culture, we are apt to say of people who are not intelligent that we must "draw them pictures" so that they may understand. Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations.

The television commercial is about products only in the sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales

We believe there are certain things people "have," certain things people "do," and even certain things people "are." These beliefs do not necessarily reflect the structure of reality they simply reflect an habitual way of talking about reality.

As I write, the President of the United States is a former Hollywood movie actor.

We might say that a technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind.

Tocqueville remarks on this in Democracy in America. "An American," he wrote, "cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation.

although culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication—from painting to hieroglyphs to the alphabet to television. Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility.

Lippmann, for example, wrote in 1920: "There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.

But what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. Our television set keeps us in constant communion with the world, but it does so with a face whose smiling countenance is unalterable. The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether. To

But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.

the concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression.

I am also aware of television's potential for creating a theater for the masses (a subject which in my opinion has not been taken seriously enough).

But what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. Our television set keeps us in constant communion with the world, but it does so with a face whose smiling countenance is unalterable. The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether.

the concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression. 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.

all television news programs begin, end, and are somewhere in between punctuated with music...It is there, I assume, for the same reason music is used in theater and films - to create a mood and provide a leitmotif for the entertainment...as long as the music is there as a frame for the program, the viewer is comforted to believe that there is nothing to be greatly alarmed about; that, in fact, the events that are reported have as much relation to reality as do scenes in a play.

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.

How people think about time and space, and about things and processes, will be greatly influenced by the grammatical features of their language.

Thou shalt not write down thy principles, still less print them, lest thou shall be entrapped by them for all time.

A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another.

television can be used to support the literate tradition.

The written word is assumed to have been reflected upon and revised by its author