Quotes About Communication

The phrase is a means of acknowledging the fact that the world as mapped by the speeded-up electronic media has no order or meaning and is not to be taken seriously.

We may say that the contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevance and to amplify impotence. But this was not all: Telegraphy also made public discourse essentially incoherent. It brought into being a world of broken time and broken attention, to use Lewis Mumford's phrase.

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 result of all this is that Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.

other forms of conversation will always remain. Speech, for example, and writing.

If the press was, as David Riesman called it, "the gunpowder of the mind," the computer, in its capacity to smooth over unsatisfactory institutions and ideas, is the talcum powder of the mind.

water everywhere without a drop to drink may serve as a metaphor of a decontextualized information environment:

There is no denying that the technicalization of terms and problems is a serious form of information control.

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

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

pseudo-event," by which he means an event specifically staged to be reported—

And in its absence, what possible interest could there be in a list of what the President says now and what he said then?

I am an optimist because I think it might just be possible for people to learn how to recognize empty, false, self-serving, or inhumane language, and therefore to protect themselves from at least some of its spiritually debasing consequences.

Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology.

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

He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of [an] artificial medium.

I mean only to call attention to the fact that there is a certain measure of arbitrariness in the forms that truth-telling may take.

The invention of new and various kinds of communication has given a voice and an audience to many people whose opinions would otherwise not be solicited, and who, in fact, have little else but verbal excrement to contribute to public issues.

They delude themselves who believe that television and print coexist, for coexistence implies parity. There is no parity here. Print is now merely a residual epistemology, and it will remain so, aided to some extent by the computer, and newspapers and magazines that are made to look like television screens.

Silence has been replaced by background noise. It's a different world.

La aparición en la arena política del asesor de imagen y el simultáneo declive del redactor de discursos atestiguan el hecho de que la televisión demanda un contenido que difiere del exigido por los otros medios. No se puede hacer filosofía política en televisión porque su forma conspira contra el contenido.

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. ~Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (introduction), 1982

Al lector se le exigirá que asuma una actitud imparcial y objetiva. Esto incluye su aporte a la tarea de lo que Bertrand Russell denominó la "inmunidad a la elocuencia", que significa que el lector es capaz de distinguir entre el placer sensual, el encanto, o el tono insinuante (si lo hubiere) de las palabras y la lógica de su argumento.

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.