Quotes About Media

As parents, I believe it's our job to enhance the good for our kids even as we try to mitigate the bad, and more than that, to remain open to learning what our children's media interests have to teach us.

A tawdry, cartoonlike version of female sexuality has become so ubiquitous, it no longer seems particular. What we once regarded as a *kind* of sexual expression we now regard *as* sexuality.

CNN is one of the participants in the war. I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected president but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.

One by one he would conjure up the world's major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit's short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him.

No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges—absorbing but never creating. Did you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won't be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV!

Men had sought beauty in many forms—in sequences of sound, in lines upon paper, in surfaces of stone, in the movements of the human body, in colours ranged through space. All these media still survived in Diaspar and down the ages others had been added to them. No one was yet certain if all the possibilities of art had been discovered, or if it had any meaning outside the mind of Man. And the same was true of love.

Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man's quest for perfect communications.

The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents, crimes, natural and man-made disasters, threats of conflict, gloomy editorials—these still seemed to be the main concern of the millions of words being sprayed into the ether. Yet Floyd also wondered if this was altogether

I would be greatly distressed if this book contributed still further to the seduction of the gullible, now cynically exploited by all the media.

The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents, crimes, natural and man-made disasters, threats of conflict, gloomy editorials—these still seemed to be the main concern of the millions of words being sprayed into the ether.

The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents

I Remember Babylon First published in Playboy, March 1960 Collected in Tales of Ten Worlds This is one of the rare cases where I violated Sam Goldwyn's excellent rule: 'If you gotta message, use Western Union.' This story was a message, five years before the first commercial communications satellite was launched, warning of their possible danger. Apart from some minor political earthquakes, everything in it has since come true.

five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels?

The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry or depressing its contents seemed to be

Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man's quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word newspaper, of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.)

Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels? If you went without sleep and did nothing else, you could follow less than a twentieth of the entertainment that's available at the turn of a switch! No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges—absorbing but never creating.

you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won't be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV!

The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents, crimes, natural and man-made disasters, threats of conflict, gloomy editorials—these still seemed to be the main concern of the millions of words being sprayed into the ether. Yet Floyd also wondered if this was altogether a bad thing; the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull. From

The Press, Watson, is a most valuable institution, if you only know how to use it.

His main problem, he knew, would be controlling the press.

It's as if we have returned to the era of Protagoras and the sophists, the era when the art of persuasion --for which slogans, commercials, public propaganda meetings, newspapers, cinema, radio are the modern equivalent-- took the place of thought, determined the fate of cities and accomplished coups

Avec la grande presse et la T.S.F., on peut faire avaler par tout un peuple, en même temps que le petit déjeuner ou le repas du soir, des opinions toutes faites et par là même absurdes, car même des vues raisonnables se déforment et deviennent fausses dans l'esprit qui les reçoit sans réflexion ; mais on ne peut avec ces choses susciter même un éclair de pensée.

As a newspaper man, Doremus remembered that the only reporters who misrepresented and concealed facts more unscrupulously than the Capitalists were the Communists.

It had become a disease with both nations, he reflected, this discussion of Britain vs. America; this incessant, irritated, family scolding. Of course back in the cornfields of the Middlewest, people didn't often discuss it, nor did the villagers on the Yorkshire moors, nor Cornish fishermen. But the people who traveled and met their cousins of the other nation, the people who fed on newspapers on either side the water, they were all obsessed.