“People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one . . . Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us” (pg xix).

A “conversation” is “all techniques that permit people of a particular culture to exchange messages” (pg 6).

A message denotes a specific, concrete statement about the world. But the forms of our media, including the symbols through which they permit conversation, do not make such statements. They are rather like metaphors, working by unobtrusive but powerful implication to enforce their special definitions of reality” (pg 10).

“What is peculiar about such interpositions of media is that their role in directing what we will see or know is so rarely noticed” (pg 11).

“The clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded” (pg 11).

“Intelligence is primarily defined as one’s capacity to grasp the truth of things” (pg 25).

“Anyone who is even slightly familiar with the history of communications knows that every new technology for thinking involves a trade off. It giveth and taketh away, although not quite in equal measure” (pg 29).

“A technology is merely a machine. A medium is the social and intellectual environment a machine creates . . . Each technology has an agenda of its own” (pg 84).

“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 commercials” (pg 93).

“Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world” (pg 106).

Grade: B

Slightly outdated, but still relevant and full of ideas and consequences worth considering.

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