Quotes About Media

But a lie is halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.

media aren't just channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot," he wrote. The content of the medium is just "the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind." P 4

never has there been a medium that, like the Net, has been programmed to so widely scatter our attention and to do it so insistently.

As McLuhan suggested, media aren't just channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Americans, no matter what their age, spend at least eight and a half hours a day looking at a television, a computer monitor, or the screen of their mobile phone. Frequently, they use two or even all three of the devices simultaneously.

When the Net absorbs a medium, it re-creates that medium in its own image. It not only dissolves the medium's physical form; it injects the medium's content with hyperlinks, breaks up the content into searchable chunks, and surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. All these changes in the form of the content also change the way we use, experience, and even understand the content.

When a newspaper moves online, the bundle falls apart.

As long as algorithms determine the distribution of profits, they will also determine what gets published. The

The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention. That's not only a result of its ability to display many different kinds of media simultaneously. It's also a result of the ease with which it can be programmed to send and receive messages.

And when we hand down our habits of thought to our children, through the examples we set, the schooling we provide, and the media we use, we hand down as well the modifications in the structure of our brains.

That same year, the futurist Edward Bellamy suggested, in a Harper's article, that people would come to read "with the eyes shut." They would carry around a tiny audio player, called an "indispensable," which would contain all their books, newspapers, and magazines.

False news spreads farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it."31

la Red atrae nuestra atención sólo para dispersarla.

In the way that everything on Wall Street was rank-ordered, with a heavy overlay of social class, trading was a lower activity than what Morgan Stanley did, the province of smaller and, to be frank about it, Jewish firms, in the same way that having clients who were in retailing or media, rather than industry, was lower, and also Jewish.

One of the big changes in politics has been because families, individuals, have felt worried, insecure... worried about the economy, worried about their jobs, worried about their kids' futures... actually the disconnect between the public and media discourse and people's everyday concerns has become bigger not smaller.

You have a political and media elite who have an idiom by which they describe politics. It's highly, highly polarised. It's right, left, red, blue, up, down, victorious, crushed.

Almost every word in the paper followed the conservative line, and you wouldn't have been surprised to read in the horoscope that 'A full moon in July will mean that Geminis will be mugged by the feral children of a heroin-addled single mother.

they illustrated an unacknowledged truth about contemporary writing: reporters, editors and artists in Britain, America and most of Europe are not afraid of politicians. They are frightened of Islamists, and do not run cartoons that might offend them. They are frightened of oligarchs and CEOs, and worry about libel and the ability of the wealthy to bend the ear of their proprietors. But they are not frightened about leaking the secrets or criticising the actions of elected governments.

The celebrity and the totalitarian share a desire to have their faces in every newspaper and on every television screen.

Peer pressure is when you decide to lob a few warheads at this week's Nazi because CNN told you to.

People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.

One could prefix the words deranged lunatic insists to any headline, and only increase its accuracy. It's practically implied, and the reading public would hardly read the little phrase as a disclaimer these days.

In a century where the media publish endless stupidities, the cultured man is defined not by what he knows but by what he ignores.