Quotes About Communication

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

We may say then that the contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence. But this was not all: Telegraphy also made public discourse essentially incoherent

Wars, crimes, crashes, fires, floods—much of it the social and political equivalent of Adelaide's whooping cough—became the content of what people called "the news of the day.

Lincoln-Douglas debates may be described as expository

Thus, it takes some digging to get at them, to grasp, for example, that a clock recreates time as an independent, mathematically precise sequence; that writing recreates the mind as a tablet on which experience is written; that the telegraph recreates news as a commodity.

America was founded by intellectuals, from which it has taken us two centuries and a communications revolution to recover.

Yeni teknolojiler eskiden beri süregelen enformasyon sorununu tepetaklak etmiÅŸtir: Ä°nsanlar bir zamanlar enformasyona gerçek hayat ortamlar?n? kendileri yönlendirebilmek amac?yla ihtiyaç duyarken, ÅŸimdilerde, asl?nda hiçbir iÅŸe yaramayan enformasyonlar?n görünüÅŸte yararl? olabileceÄŸi baÄŸlamlar? yaratmak zorunda kalmaktad?rlar.

Question asking is the most important intellectual tool we have.

The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into—what else?—another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

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

Language has an ideological agenda that is apt to be hidden from view.

For on television the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of himself, as offer himself as an image of the audience.

The principal strength of the telegraph was its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it or analyze it.

But the telegraph demands that we burn its contents.

Television is not old enough to have matched printing's output of junk.

To which we might add that every epistemology is the epistemology of a stage of media development. Truth, like time itself, is a product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented.

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.

New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop.

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.

Every medium of communication, I am claiming, has resonance, for resonance is metaphor writ large.

We attend to fragments of events from all over the world because we have multiple media whose forms are well suited to fragmented conversation.

It is in the nature of the medium that it must suppress the content of ideas in order to accommodate the requirements of visual interest;

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

is an irony that I have confronted many times in being told that I must appear on television to promote a book that warns people against television.