The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.
Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions...
How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not othe...
Writing is defined as a conversation with no one and yet with everyone.
Marx understood well that the press was not merely a machine but a structure for discourse, which both rules out and insists upon certain kinds of content and, inevitably, a certain kind of audience.
Technopoly is to say that its information immune system is inoperable. Technopoly is a form of cultural AIDS, which I here use as an acronym for Anti-Information Deficiency Syndrome. This is why it is...
For no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are. It is not important that those who ask the questions arrive at my answers or Marshall McLuhan's (quite different an...
In tracking what people have to say about schooling, I notice that most of the conversation is about means, rarely about ends. . . It is as if we are a nation of technicians, consumed by our expertise...
The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. T...
Until, years from now, when it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved very little of imp...
If parents wish to preserve childhood for their own children, they must conceive of parenting as an act of rebellion against culture.
Poverty is a great educator. Having no boundaries and refusing to be ignored, it mostly teaches hopelessness. But not always. Politics is also a great educator. Mostly it teaches, I am afraid, cynicis...
You are required to assume an attitude of detachment and objectivity. This includes your bringing to the task what Bertrand Russell called an immunity to eloquence, meaning that you are able to distin...
We must keep in mind the story of the statistician who drowned while trying to wade across a river with an average depth of four feet.
This is the lesson of all great television commercials: They provide a slogan, a symbol or a focus that creates for viewers a comprehensive and compelling image of themselves. In the shift from party...
Attend any conference on telecommunications or computer technology, and you will be attending a celebration of innovative machinery that generates, stores, and distributes more information, more conve...
As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant.
On October 16, 1854, in Peoria, Illinois, Douglas delivered a three-hour address to which Lincoln, by agreement, was to respond. When Lincoln’s turn came, he reminded the audience that it was already...
Wenn wir weiterhin die Wissenschaft oder die Heilige Schrift so lesen, als gäben sie uns die Wahrheit direkt und definitiv, dann werden alle darin enthaltenen Hoffnungen und Versprechen zu Staub. Eine...
I am constantly amazed at how obediently people accept explanations that begin with the words The computer shows … or The computer has determined … It is Technopoly’s equivalent of the sentence It is...