Quotes on TV, the Internet and post-modern culture by
Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Umberto Eco, and others
"Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century."
Marshall McLuhan
"I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it."
Marshall McLuhan
"All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values."
Marshall McLuhan
"Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be."
Marshall McLuhan
"The medium is the message."
Marshall McLuhan
"We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us."
Marshall McLuhan
"Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness."
Marshall McLuhan
"A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding."
Marshall McLuhan
"Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it."
Marshall McLuhan
"As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes."
Marshall McLuhan
"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say."
Marshall McLuhan
"Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness."
Marshall McLuhan
“I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anti-communication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
“Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation. Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress. And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
“With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
“Many decisions about the form and content of news programs are made on the basis of information about the viewer, the purpose of which is to keep the viewers watching so that they will be exposed to the commercials.”
― Neil Postman, How to Watch TV News
“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 politics to television politics, the same goal is sought. We are not permitted to know who is best at being President or Governor or Senator, but whose image is best in touching and soothing the deep reaches of our discontent. We look at the television screen and ask, in the same voracious way as the Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?" We are inclined to vote for those whose personality, family life, and style, as imaged on the screen, give back a better answer than the Queen received. As Xenophanes remarked twenty-five centuries ago, men always make their gods in their own image. But to this, television politics has added a new wrinkle: Those who would be gods refashion themselves into images the viewers would have them be.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
“There is nothing wrong with entertainment. As some psychiatrist once put it, we all build castles in the air. The problems come when we try to live in them. The communications media of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with telegraphy and photography at their center, called the peek-a-boo world into existence, but we did not come to live there until television. Television gave the epistemological biases of the telegraph and the photograph their most potent expression, raising the interplay of image and instancy to an exquisite and dangerous perfection. And it brought them into the home. We are by now well into a second generation of children for whom television has been their first and most accessible teacher and, for many, their most reliable companion and friend. To put it plainly, television is the command center of the new epistemology. There is no audience so young that it is barred from television. There is no poverty so abject that it must forgo television. There is no education so exalted that it is not modified by television. And most important of all, there is no subject of public interest—politics, news, education, religion, science, sports—that does not find its way to television. Which means that all public understanding of these subjects is shaped by the biases of television.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
“Television screens saturated with commercials promote the utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naive but commonplace notion that commercials are about products. They are about products in the same sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales. ”
― Neil Postman
“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and comercials.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
“The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.”
― Umberto Eco
“The print does not always have the same shape as the body that impressed it, and it doesn't always derive from the pressure of a body. At times it reproduces the impression a body has left in our mind: it is the print of an idea.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
“Once upon a time there were mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives, for those who were not prisoners to the mass media.
Well, it's all over. We have to start again from the beginning, asking one another what's going on.”
― Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality
“The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
“It seems to me that television is exactly like a gun. Your enjoyment of it is determined by which end of it you're on.”
― Alfred Hitchcock
“Seeing a murder on television... can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.”
― Alfred Hitchcock
“Even if tomorrow will be the end of the world, people will still continue to watch television for whole day!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan
“Watching too much TV can triple our hunger for more possessions, while reducing our personal contentment by about 5 percent for every hour a day we watch.”
― David Niven
“How can even the idea of rebellion against corporate culture stay meaningful when Chrysler Inc. advertises trucks by invoking “The Dodge Rebellion”? How is one to be a bona fide iconoclast when Burger King sells onion rings with “Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules”? How can an Image-Fiction writer hope to make people more critical of televisual culture by parodying television as a self-serving commercial enterprise when Pepsi and Subaru and FedEx parodies of self-serving commercials are already doing big business? It’s almost a history lesson: I’m starting to see just why turn-of-the-century Americans’ biggest fear was of anarchist and anarchy. For if anarchy actually wins, if rulelessness become the rule, then protest and change become not just impossible but incoherent. It’d be like casting a ballot for Stalin: you are voting for an end to all voting.”
― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
“The sky was thick with TV. If you wore special glasses you could see them spinning through the sky among the bats and homing birds—blondes, wars, famines, football, food shows, coups d'état, hairstyles stiff with hair spray. Designer pectorals. Gliding towards Ayemenem like skydivers. Making patterns in the sky. Wheels. Windmills. Flowers blooming and unblooming.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
"So I come finally to my principal point here, that this latest mutation in space —postmodern hyperspace—has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world. And I have already suggested that this alarming disjunction point between the body and its built environment…can itself stand as the symbol and analogue of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentred communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects."
Frederick Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism"
People are sheep. TV is the shepherd.”
― Jess C. Scott, Literary Heroin (Gluttony): A Twilight Parody
“A mirror is like my own personal reality TV show—where I’m both the star and only viewer. I’ve got to get my ratings up.
”
― Jarod Kintz, The Merits of Marthaism, and How Being Named Susan Can Benefit You
“If you believe that your thoughts originate inside your brain, do you also believe that television shows are made inside your television set?”
― Warren Ellis
“The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.”
― Michael Parenti, Against Empire
“If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace.”
― John Lennon
“Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Damned
“The amount of educational programming on television today is simply desensitizing. The only reason left to go to school is to see gun violence.”
― Bauvard, Some Inspiration for the Overenthusiastic
“Never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television.”
― Gore Vidal
“The television is 'real'. It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest, 'What nonsense!'.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
“A rumor is usually a lie that the media can legally profit from.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“She had witnessed in nauseating detail how the human world worked: its rituals of comfort (television, food, religion); its appetite for poison (television, food, religion); and for the monstrous edifices of desire (television, food, religion): she understood them all.”
― Clive Barker, Absolute Midnight
“Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye.”
― Bill Hicks
