… as teachers we have to recognize that education is no longer a monopoly of the classroom and that the young are learning as much outside as inside the classroom. Moreover, we ourselves have to face new facts and new media which are as novel for us as for our students. We have, as never before, to shape the learning process with them.

As educators committed to the processing of information flow, we have no choice but to teach the new languages through the old and the old through the new. The cinema students of Miss Cecile Starr at Columbia say to her on learning the language of film: ‘If only we had known this in high-school, how much more we would have enjoyed our literature courses.’ And if students of literature painting and music knew the profound interrelation between the technical innovations in these arts in the past century, if they were even prepared to notice the deep roots which the fine arts always have in the forms of the most vulgar and popular entertainments, they would be less alienated by formal instruction in the arts today.

(After expressing gratitude for Wain’s book of poems, A Word Carved on a Sill, 1956)
In fact, I wish you could get out an L.P. disc of those poems. The sooner professors of literature become disc-jockeys the better!

The language of visual forms is, therefore, one which lies to hand as an unused Esperanto at everybody’s command.

Even if we should wish to recover that older world we can do so only by an intensive study of the ways in which the media have swallowed it. And no matter how many walls have fallen, the citadel of individual consciousness has not fallen nor is it likely to fall. For it is not accessible to the mass media.

The problem has been falsely seen as democracy vs. the mass media. But the mass media are democracy. The book itself was the first mechanical mass medium.

We must first master and then teach these new languages in all their minute particularity and riches. In so doing we have available on an unprecedented scale the resources of comparison and contrast.

Poe and Dickens, however, made their move not at the privileged level of the art consciousness of a capital such as Paris. They already lived in the new conditions of collective consciousness from which the sharp individual articulation of awareness had disappeared or in which it was insignificant. London assumed this character by 1780. America was, as a continent, in this state from the same period.

If our present means of exploring and presenting the human past are such as to make simultaneously present all kinds of human pasts, then we have moved into the period of post-history.

One equivalent of psychoanalysis might be x-ray.

The reader of the newspaper accepts the newspaper not so much as a highly artificial image having some correspondence to reality as he tends to accept it as reality itself.

The telegraph is not the mechanization of writing but the electrification of writing.

Personally, I think that the effect of the telegraph has been, like that of the later media, to break down the division between our inner and outer worlds.

"In the electronic age, we're living by music."