Quotes About Technology

we made a few bushels of first-rate blasting powder

we brought the wires to the ground at the chapel, and then brought them under the ground to the platform, and hid the batteries there.

Cahill intended the Telharmonium to transmit music through phone lines to paying subscribers, but the venture failed.

despite rational objections, technology's failure is overrun by the onslaught of myth.

It kind of depressed me to think a human could be so lonely that she would comfort herself with the company of appliances that whistle, and sit alone to eat.

The wheel… is an extension of the foot. The book… is an extension of the eye… Clothing, an extension of the skin… Electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.

All media work us over completely.

The greatest discovery of the 21st century will be the discovery that Man was not meant to live at the speed of light.

if it works it's obsolete

Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind.

The student of media soon comes to expect the New Media of any period whatever to be classed as 'pseudo' by those who acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be.

Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up.

In accepting an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame a few years ago, General David Sarnoff made this statement: "We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left.

Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth

A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.

War and the fear of war have always been considered the main incentives to technological extension of our bodies. Indeed, Lewis Mumford, in his The City in History, considers the walled city itself an extension of our skins, as much as housing and clothing. More even than the preparation for war, the aftermath of invasion is a rich technological period; because the subject culture has to adjust all its sense ratios to accommodate the impact of the invading culture.

Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions. Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools—with yesterday's concepts.

By the way, goals and objectives are meaningless at the speed of light. At the speed of light, you aren't going somewhere, you're already there. On the telephone you're not going somewhere, you're there. And in the electronic world, going somewhere, you're there. And in the electronic world, there are no goals or objectives, we're already there. McLuhan CD-ROM

The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.

The constant broadcast and reception of ghostly images via radio and television, according to this notion, had weakened the sense, particularly among youth, of possessing physical the sense, particularly among youth, of possessing physical bodies and private identities. McLuhan CD-ROM

Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition.

In the age of instant information man ends his job of fragmented specializing and assumes the role of information-gathering. Today information-gathering resumes the inclusive concept of "culture" exactly as the primitive food-gatherer worked in complete equilibrium with his entire environment. Our quarry now, in this new nomadic and "workless" world, is knowledge and insight into the creative processes of life and society.

The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology, on and through which the American way of life was formed.