Watch this video before you read the text excerpt:
The threat of Stalin or Hitler was external. The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blin and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg (printing press) technology, on and through which the American way of life was formed. It is, however, no time to suggest strategies when the threat has not even been acknowledged.
I am in the position of Louis Pasteur telling doctors that their greatest enemy was quite invisible, and quite unrecognized by them.
Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.
The effects of techonology do not ocurr at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily without any resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter techonology with impunity (without punishment), just because he is an expert of the changes in sense perception.
“All media are extensions of some human faculty- psychic or physical.”
“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.”
The goose quill put an end to talk. It abolished mystery; it gave architecture and towns; it brought roads and armies, bureaucracy. It was the basic metaphor with which the cycle of civilization began, the step from the dark into the light of the mind. The hand that filled the parchment page built a city.