Information & Communication Theory

Wikipedia - Outline of Communication [link]

'Communication - purposeful activity of exchanging information and meaning across space and time using various technical or natural means, whichever is available or preferred. Communication requires a sender, a message, a medium and a recipient, although the receiver does not have to be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of communication; thus communication can occur across vast distances in time and space.'

Oxford Dictionary [link]

1. [mass noun] 'The imparting or exchanging of information by speaking, writing, or using some other medium.'

1.2 'The successful conveying or sharing of ideas and feelings.'

2 (communications) 'Means of sending or receiving information, such as telephone lines or computers.'

Practical | Zine Test

This zine test is a more refined alternative to the cut-up zines I've made previously. It compiles a selection of the collages and images I've made, giving them a context of their own once placed together in a booklet.

It includes a mixture of final collages, as well as scrappy sketchbook pages which have been cropped. The zine/publication format elevates them slightly, hopefully giving them (a little) more importance because of it becomes a standalone artifact (not just existing as a notebook in a drawer, for example.)

Publications are effective because, generally speaking, the content they are made up of is usually curated - sharing a thread of meaning, context, themes, or at the very least are visually related in some way.

Even if the content within this zine isn't immediately clear, because they form a small 'collection' in the form of a publication, readers will assume that the pages all link somehow.

Marshall McLuhan Speaks

Marshall McLuhan in conversation with Norman Mailer, 1968 [link]

5:13 - 'The environment is not visible. It's information. It's electronic.'

6:21 - 'The present is the enemy. The present is the - and this will delight you, Norman - the present is only faced in any generation by the artist.'

6:31 - 'The artist is prepared to study the present as his material because it is the area of challenge to the whole sensory life, and therefore it's anti-utopian. It's a world of anti-values.'

PATTERN RECOGNITION

10:25 - 'When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition - in other words, to structuring the experience. And I think this is part of the artist's world.'

10:41 - 'The artist, when he encounters the present....is always seeking new patterns, new pattern recognition, which is his task, for heaven's sake...'

11:03 - 'He alone has the sensory awareness necessary to tell us what our world is made of. He's more important than the scientist.'

The Future of Man in the Electric Age, 1965 [link]

1:40 - 'The effect of script and the ability to make inventories and collect data and store data changed many social habits and processes back as early as 3000 BC.'

'the effects of rearranging one's experience, organising one's experience by these new extensions of our powers, are quite unexpected. Perhaps one way of putting it is to say that writing represents a high degree of specialising of our powers.'

3:10 - Kermode: 'How would you describe the impact of the invention of the printing press? Give us some instances of what happened as a consequence of it.'

McLuhan: 'It created - almost overnight it created what we call a nationalism, what in effect was a public. The old manuscript forms were not sufficiently powerful instruments of technology to create publics in the sense that the print was able to do - unified, homogenous, reading publics.'

3:39 - 'Everything that we prize in our Western world in matters of individualism, separatism, and of unique point of view and private judgement - all of those factors are highly favoured by the printed world, and not really favoured by other forms of culture like radio or earlier by the manuscript.'

THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE

7:51 - '...any medium, be it radio or be it wheel, tends to create a completely new human environment.'

8:09 - 'The unawareness of the environmental is compensated for by the attention to the content of the environment. the environment as merely a set of ground rules and as a kind of overall enveloping force gets very little recognition as a form, except from the artist.'

The Medium is the Message, New York University seminar, 1977 [link]

'The ground is the message, not the content.'

'It's not what you say on the telephone, it's the fact that the telephone service is environmental.'

Practical | Deconstructed Collages

Examples from my sketchbook where I've taken existing large scale posters and images that I've made, and have cut them down and rearranged them even further.

They create something new yet again, and act as a way for me to see how far I can push the same images / phrases / content in order to generate something separate.

The last pages, which are cut-ups of large ink type posters, deconstruct the phrase itself until it becomes an abstract graphic arrangement of shapes and forms.

By chopping and selecting smaller elements images and putting them into a composition, they become images in their own right.

Marshall McLuhan | Daniel Savage

• Commented on a changing media landscape 

• Theories on the medium

• Writing about the effects of mass media on our lives. He wasn't talking about the content - the information itself, but the form - the technologies that provide you with content.

• He wasn't saying that content is inconsequential, but when we pay too much attention to it we ignore the power of form in shaping our experience.

• So if you don't understand the medium, you don't fully understand the message.

• Once books were all handwritten, put someone invented the printing press and mass media became a reality.

• The form changed our collective experience, it informed identity, how we imagined ourselves.

• Same with electronic media, telegraphs, telephones, television - devices that redefined time and space, and extended our experience beyond our boundaries.

COP Tutorial

TUTOR FEEDBACK

Introduction

• Rules of visual communication (legibility, composition, purpose, function...)

• How they can be broken - and why that's done
     - Political
     - Reaction against mass media
     - Personal agenda

References

• Dada
• Punk flyers
• Zine culture, underground publications
• Post-modernist graphic design (Ed Fella, David Carson...)

• Authenticity of a message
• Recycling reusing existing information

Reflective Practice

• McLuhan and 'The Medium is the Message'
• Your work is a vehicle for delivery, open to interpretation

Specific Essay Changes

• Define what a message is (link artists, and how they visually communicate messages)
• Information Theory - relates to packets of data, how are messages sent and received?
• Change title - 'What is subversive communication?'

AUDIO FEEDBACK

• Think about altering the structure of the essay, subverting the structure? As long as academic conventions are met, this could be done. Re-constitute the pro-forma that you have been given.

• Shorten question "What is subversive communication?" - opens question out, engage better

• Introduction - touches upon areas that should be in chapter 2. Talking about lo-fi, cost effective, make references to zine culture...could also be in chapter 2.

• Legibility as a theory could also be in chapter 2, a rejection of the establishment, of capitalism, of consumer-oriented society..follow these lines of enquiry.

• Your research encompasses quite a lot of things and theories that come together to create this reaction, and the reaction is this subversive communication.

• Outcomes are more authentic and meaningful to the artist. This could be the rationale for your project, put in the introduction.

• Introduction could describe what the project is about, and how you may explore it, the structure of the essay itself, and things you may touch upon.

• In Themes and Contexts, could talk about Fluxus, and the New York Correspondence School, also talk about the status of artworks - ephemera as artworks, think about mail art as a form of art.

Practical | Proto-zines

Here is a closer look at the prototype zines I had made previously.

I suppose the methods with which they are created informs their function. They are the byproduct of photocopied versions of my A3 posters, that have been folded and cut up to create new arrangements of images and texts.

In some ways, this subverts the content of the original posters even more, possibly imposing new contexts and meaning?

What I'm looking at by creating these is how my messages become more and more subverted through the process of dissecting and chopping up existing material, almost degrading it further.

Practical | Further Posters

More examples of larger-scale collage posters I've made. Enjoying working in this particular medium, using a mashup of materials. They are much more typographic than I would have expected however I think the words give clues towards to origins of the content, but also could confuse things further, which is fine.

One particular phrase I like is THE AMATEUR CAN AFFORD TO LOSE.
This came from reading Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Message.

I think this quote sums up what I'm trying to do, and justifies the intent of my approach, the aesthetic, and the content I am choosing to generate. It is about ignoring standards tied to professionalism, 'good art', and such. 

Working in this way has allowed me to generate some outcomes that I think successfully reflect my research and the intent of my project.

I think that next, my focus should be on distribution of these images and possibly putting them into different contexts and settings.

Case Studies

RAY JOHNSON

• Subversive aesthetic, range of visual sources, contrasting visual material, using found imagery, disregards rules of form, perspective, accuracy. Creates assemblages out of materials that could be seen as throw-away, disposable.

• Subversive communication methods. Mail art, New York Correspondence School, public distribution, collaboration, involving the public, taking art to the streets as opposed to only existing in a museum. 

• His art is purely subversive - transforming expendable, everyday objects into sacred artifacts that are regarded as pieces of art today. Letters, envelopes, magazine cut-outs, cigarette boxes, general trash. Elevating these mundane materials, subverting what is traditionally considered art - using cheap, readymade assets.

LIMNER JOURNAL

• Non-linear structure, content isn't organised in a typical fashion. Articles aren't always written on consecutive pages, often interrupted by images, or cut-off mid sentence. 

• Aesthetically subversive - e.g. issue 3 doesn't have a clear title placed at the top of the page, or a subheading, or a price attached. A list of artist names are choppily listed on the cover, which at a first glance make no sense if those names are unknown to you.

• This issue in particular celebrates self-authored work, which possesses a sketchbook-like quality, rough around the edges, not glossy, finalised illustrations. Scanned pencil drawings on scraps of paper take up full page spreads, images from collaborators appear one after the other with little to no context or information about what the images are about.

• Primarily image based, however articles and critical texts are attached via smaller pieces of paper in the middle of various pages. No need for highlighting 'THIS IS AN ARTICLE' 'THIS IS AN IMAGE TO ACCOMPANY IT' 'THIS IS THE CONTENTS PAGE', lack of headings, page numbers, etc.

PUNK FLYERS (+ FANZINES)

• Subversive in terms of their aesthetic and their content - no attention given to legibility, clarity, form, composition. Very intuitive design processes, not thought out too much. Created with amateur materials, in an amateurish way. No professionalism or expensive materials or equipment - scissors, glue, a photocopier, bound with staples or safety pins.

• Subversive in their function - fanzines, posters, homemade newspapers discussing favourite bands and concerts, underground fashion, politics, personal reflections. Not about commercial success or gaining a wider public following. Self-indulgent, from a place of personal interest.

Others?

TOYNBEE TILES

DADAISM

POLISH POSTER ART

100 Years of Dada | Article

100 Years of Dada: an unpublished project about the subversive

art movement finally realised, Alexander Hawkins
29th Feb 2016, It's Nice That [link]

Dada-Messe, Berlin, 1920
The first international 'dada-fair' catalogue

on the Dada-Messe of 1920 (source): '...The hierarchy between fine art and applied art were reduced to nothing; performances and even a cooking prize were organized; finally, the catalogue, quite fitting for the exhibition's iconoclasm, was a single piece of newspaper folded in two.'

• '100 years ago Tristan Tzara and his Dada cohorts took art off the wall and showed it could be anything from a performance to a page in a magazine'

• 'Dada...was the quintessential anti-art movement'

• 'After centuries of painting and classical-themed sculpture came the first performance to bill itself as art: a bewildering and wholly alien mix of vaudeville, poetry written in three languages, riding crops, monocles and dance.'

• 'From here, against political backdrop of war, artists like Huge Ball and Jean Arp and Tzara were the first, or at least the most prominent figures to embrace the ideas of art as protest and reject the idea of art as commodity'

• 'Publishing was an essential part of Dadaist ongoings, and homespun art and literary journals with radical design elements were all part of a campaign to spread Dada ideas like art propaganda.'

• '...Tzara invited more than 50 artists from ten countries to submit artworks that ranged from self-portraits, drawings, and book layouts for his planned but ultimately unpublished Dadaglobe.'

Venus beim Spiel der Könige
Johannes Baargeld, 1920

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Marshall McLuhan, 1964
online link [here] (50th Anniversary reissue? 2014)

THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE

pg. 10 - 'The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message...unless it is use to spell out some verbal ad or name.'

'This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the "content" of any medium is always another medium.'

'The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph.'

'An abstract painting represents direct manifestation of creative thought processes as they might appear in computer designs.'

'What we are considering here, however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes.'

'For the "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.'

'Let us return to the electric lights. When the light is being used for brain surgery or night baseball is a matter of indifference. It could be argued that these activities are in some ways the "content" of the electric light, since they could not exist without the electric light.'

'This fact merely underlines the point that "the medium is the message" because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.'

'The content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association...it is only too typical that the "content" of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.'

pg. 16 - 'De Tocqueville, in earlier work on the French Revolution, had explained how it was the printed word that, achieving cultural saturation in the eighteenth century, had homogenized the French nation.'

'The typographic principles of uniformity, continuity, and lineality had overlaid the complexities of ancient feudal and oral society.'

'The grammar of print cannot help to construe the message of oral and nonwritten culture and institutions.'

pg. 17 - '..."Rational", of course, has for the West long meant "uniform and continuous and sequential." In other words, we have confused reason with literacy, and rationalism with a single technology.'

pg. 18 - 'If the criminal appears as a nonconformist who is unable to meet the demand of technology that we behave in uniform and continuous patterns, literate man is quite inclined to see others who cannot conform as somewhat pathetic.'

pg. 19 - 'Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.'

pg. 20 - 'Today when we want to get our bearings in our own culture, and have need to stand aside from the bias and pressure exerted by any technical form of human expression, we have only to visit a society where that particular form has not been felt, or a historical period in which it was unknown.'

pg. 22 - 'Electric speed mingles the cultures of prehistory with the dregs of industrial marketeers, the nonliterate with the semiliterate and the postliterate. Mental breakdown of varying degrees is the very common result of uprooting and inundation with new information and endless new patterns of information.'

MEDIA COLD AND HOT

pg. 30 - 'A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in "high definition." High definition is the state of being well filled with data.'

'...And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener.'

'On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.'

pg. 31 - '...Therefore a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone.'

'A cool medium like hieroglyphic or ideogrammic written characters has very different effects from the hot and explosive medium of the phonetic alphabet. The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography.'

'The printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, creating extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly.'

'But the typical reversal occurred when extremes of monopoly brought back the corporation, with its impersonal empire over many lives.'

'Any hot medium allows for less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than dialogue.'

'With print many earlier forms were exclude from life and art, and many were given strange new intensity.'

pg. 32 - 'The medium of money or wheel or writing, or any other form of specialist speed-up of exchange and information, will serve to fragment a tribal structure.'

pg. 35 - 'In terms of the theme of media hot and cold, backward countries are cool, and we are hot. The "city slicker" is hot, and the rustic is cool.'

HYBRID ENERGY

pg. 65 - 'The printed book had encouraged artists to reduce all forms of expression as much as possible to the single descriptive and narrative plane of the printed word.'

'The advent of electric media released art from this straitjacket at once, creating the world of Paul Klee, Picasso, Braque, Eisenstein, the Marx Brothers, and James Joyce'

pg. 67 - 'The hybrid of the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born. For the parallel between two media holds us on the frontiers between forms that snap us out of Narcissus-narcosis.'

'The moment of the meeting of media is a moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them on our senses.'

MEDIA AS TRANSLATORS

pg. 69 - 'All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms.'

'The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.'

'Words are a kind of information retrieval that can range over the total environment and experience at high speed.'

'Words are complex systems of metaphors and symbols that translate experience into our uttered or outered senses. They are a technology of explicitness.'

'In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness. That is what is meant when we say that we daily know more and more about man. We mean that we can translate more and more of ourselves into other forms of expression that exceed ourselves.'

CHALLENGE AND COLLAPSE

pg. 74 - 'It was Bertrand Russell who declared the great discovery of the twentieth century was the technique of the suspended judgement.'

NOTE: 'Suspended judgment is a cognitive process and a rational state of mind in which one withholds judgments, particularly on the drawing of moral or ethical conclusions.' (Wikipedia 20.11.17)

(Could relate to subversion, as the need to reach a defined end point or a clear meaning is removed, you aren't presented with all of the information, it's not necessary to your understanding or your experience of what's in front of you)

THE SPOKEN WORD

pg. 94 - 'Suppose that, instead of displaying the Stars and Stripes, we were to write the words "American Flag" across a piece of cloth and to display that. While the symbols would convey the same meaning, the effect would be quite different.
To translate the rich visual mosaic of the Stars and Stripes into written form would be to deprive it of most of its qualities of corporate image and of experience...'

THE PRINT

pg. 177 - 'We are confronted here once more with that basic function of media - to store and to expedite information.'

'The fact that visual information about flowers and plants cannot be stored verbally also points to the fact that science in the Western world has long been dependent on the visual factor.'

'Well before Gutenberg's development of printing from movable types, a great deal of printing on paper by woodcut had been done. Perhaps the most popular form of this kind of block printing of text and image had been in the form of Biblia Pauperum, or Bibles of the Poor.'

'Printers in this woodcut sense preceded typographic printers, though by just how long a period is not easy to establish, because these cheap and popular prints, despised by the learned, were not preserved any more than are the comic books of today.'

pg. 179 - 'It is relevant to consider that the old prints and woodcuts, like the modern comic strip and comic book, provide very little data about any particular moment in time, or aspect in space, of an object.'

'The viewer, or reader, is compelled to participate in completing and interpreting the few hints provided by the bounding lines. Not unlike the character of the woodcut and the cartoon is the TV image, with its very low degree of data about objects, and the resulting high degree of participation by the viewer in order to complete what is only hinted at...'

pg. 182 - '...in the low definition world of the medieval woodcut, each object created its own space, and there was no rational connected space into which it must fit.'

'As the retinal impressions intensified, objects cease to cohere in a space of their own making, and, instead, become "contained" in a uniform, continuous and "rational" space.'

COMICS

pg. 184 - 'The structural qualities of the print and woodcut obtain, also, in the cartoon, all of which share a participational and do-it-yourself character that pervades a wide variety of media experiences today.'

'Comics (as already explained in the chapter on The Print), being low in definition, are a highly participational form of expression...'

pg. 186 - 'Picasso has long been a fan of American comics. The highbrow, from Joyce to Picasso, has long been devoted to American popular art because he finds in it an authentic imaginative reaction to official action.'

pg. 188 - 'The first comic book appeared in 1935. Not having anything connected or literary about them, and being as difficult to decipher as the Book of Kells, they caught on with the young.'

'The elders of the tribe, who had never noticed that the ordinary newspaper was as frantic as a surrealist art exhibition, could hardly be expected to notice that the comic books were as exotic as eighth-century illuminations.'

Individual Tutorial

Tutor notes

• Practical is well developed
• The purpose of the message - ambiguity and recognition
• Interpretation - buzzwords - correspondence
• Essay - define terminology - subversion in the context of communication
• Write up - Introduction - type up from peer review boards
• Start writing in order to identify the gaps (e.g. where extra theory is required)

My notes

• Practical work contains unspecific messages, authored by the reader

• Features personal symbolism/iconography/logic, however the audience can't always decode

• Interested in the mystery of ambiguity

• Ideas about distribution? (a postbox? collaborating with strangers? addressing them to people?)

• Creating a network. Classrooms, pin boards, public spaces, studio drawers..

Essay

• Stick to subversive forms of communication• Define those terms for essay (subversion)
• What is the value of subversion within visual communication?
      - authenticity
      - the allure of ambiguity
      - subjectivity in art (not everyone will enjoy something, so why try to please them all?)
      - individualism (age of the individual)

• The essay is about discussing, investigating and defining a subject, not answering a big question in a concrete way.

The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan

The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects
Marshall McLuhan, Quention Fiore
Gingko Press, 2001  (ISBN 1-58423-070-3)     from [here]

"The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies

in which they occur." - A. N. Whitehead

pg. 8 - 'The medium, or process, of our time - electric technology - is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted.'

'Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.'

'The alphabet, for instance, is a technology that is absorbed by the very young child in a completely unconscious manner...'

'Words and the meaning of words predispose the child to think and act automatically in certain ways. The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement.'

'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.'

pg. 10 - 'Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasing old categories - for probing around. When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised, put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result.'

pg. 26 - 'All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.'

'The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.'

'ALL MEDIA ARE EXTENSIONS OF SOME HUMAN FACULTY - PSYCHIC OR PHYSICAL'

pg. 44 - 'The dominant organ of sensory and social orientation in pre-alphabet societies was the ear - "hearing was believing." The phonetic alphabet forced the magic world of the ear to yield to the neutral world of the eye. Man was given an eye for an ear.'

'Western history was shaped for some three thousand years by the introduction of the phonetic alphabet, a medium that depends solely on the eye for comprehension. The alphabet is a construct of fragmented bits and parts which have no semantic meaning in themselves, and which must be strung together in a line, bead-like, and in a prescribed order.'

'Its use fostered and encouraged the habit of perceiving all environment in visual and spatial terms - particularly in terms of a space and of a time that are uniform'

pg. 48 - 'Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.'

'The goose quill put an end to talk. It abolished mystery; it gave architecture and towns; it brought roads and armies, bureaucracy...'

pg. 50 - 'Printing, a ditto device, confirmed and extended the new visual stress. It provided the first uniformly repeatable "commodity", the first assembly line - mass production.'

'It created the portable book, which men could read in privacy and in isolation from others. Man could now inspire - and conspire.'

'Like easel panting, the printed book added much to the new cult of individualism. The private, fixed point of view became impossible and literacy conferred the power of detachment, non-involvement.'

pg. 68 - 'Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. The groundrules, pervasive structure, and over-all patterns of environments elude easy perception. Anti-environments, or countersituations made by artists, provide means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly.'

'The interplay between the old and the new environments creates many problems and confusions. The main obstacle to a clear understanding of the effects of the new media is our deeply embedded habit of regarding all phenomena from a fixed point of view.'

'Print technology created the public. Electric technology created the mass. The public consists of separate individuals walking around with separate fixed points of view.'

pg. 76 - 'When information is brushed against information...the results are startling anfd effective. The perennial quest for involvement, fill-in, takes many forms.

pg. 88 - 'The poet, the artist, the sleuth - whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely "well-adjusted", he cannot go along with currents and trends.'

'A strange bond often exists among anti-social types in their power to see environments as they really are.'

pg. 92 - 'Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment - of what's really going on - affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions.'

'Older societies thrived on purely literary plots. They demanded story lines. Today's humor, on the contrary, has no story line - no sequence. It is usually a compressed overlay of stories.'

pg. 93 - 'Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental.'

'Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society.'

'The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment.'

'The ground rules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly and unaware. The "expert" is the man who stays put.'

pg. 94 - 'Our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old.'

'These are difficult times because we are witnessing a clash of cataclysmic proportions between two great technologies. We approach the new with the psychological conditioning and sensory responses of the old.'

'The clash naturally occurs in transitional periods. In late medieval art, for instance, we saw the fear of the new print technology expressed in the theme The Dance of Death. Today, similar fears are expressed in the Theater of the Absurd. Both represent a common failure: the attempt to do a job demanded by the new environment with the tools of the old.'

pg. 117 - 'Most people find it difficult to understand purely verbal concepts. They suspect the ear; they don't trust it. In general we feel more secure when things are visible, when we can "see for ourselves"'

'All kinds of "shorthand" systems of notation have been developed to help us see what we hear.'

'We employ visual and spatial metaphors for a great many everyday expressions. We insist on employing visual metaphors even when we refer to purely psychological states, such as tendency and duration.'

'We are so visually biased that we call our wisest men visionaries, or seers!'

pg. 122 - "Authorship" - in the sense we know it today, individual intellectual effort related to the book as an economic commodity - was practically unknown before the advent of print technology.'

'Medieval scholars were indifferent to the precise identity of the "books" they studied. In turn, they rarely signed even what was clearly their own. They were a humble service organization.'

'The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. Mechanical multiples of the same text created a public - a reading public. The rising consumer-oriented culture became concerned with labels of authenticity and protection against theft and piracy.'

'The idea of copyright - "the exclusive right to reproduce, publish, and sell the matter and form of a literary or artistic work" - was born.'

'Xerography - everyman's brain-picker - heralds the times of instant publishing. Anybody can now become both author and publisher. Take any books on any subject and custom-make your own book by simply xeroxing a chapter from this one, a chapter from that one - instant steal!'

'As new technologies come into play, people are less and less convinces of the importance of self-expression. Teamwork succeeds private effort.'

pg. 142 - 'The environment as a processor of information is propaganda. Propaganda ends where dialogue begins. You must talk to the media, not to the programmer.'

pg. 157 - 'You see, Dad, Professor McLuhan says the environment that man creates becomes his medium for defining his role in it. The invention of type created linear, or sequential, thought, separating thought from action. Now, with TV and folk singing, thought and action are closer and social involvement is greater. We again live in a village. Get it?'

"It is the business of the future to be dangerous."

- A. N. Whitehead