…when one service is enveloped by a new service, those who employ the old service are deeply affected it. Writing for the press in the age of print and the photo was considerably altered by those intensely realistic developments.

Paradoxically, then, it is at the moment when public attention occupies every phase and feature of a new service environment of technology that there is heard, on the one hand, the dogma of what the public wants, and on the other hand, the arguments against the dilution and pollution by commercialism.

Every service environment breeds immeasurable disservices. This inspired Baudelaire to label them Fleurs du Mal. These ancient flowers take new root and nurture from new technologies in unexpected ways.

Even Aristotle was led into the “usury” trap by his failure to see the enormous service environments created by writing and coinage as wealth-makers. From Adam Smith and Ricardo to Karl Marx and Keynes, economists have ignored all service/disservice environments. This blank in their vision has rendered their analyses sterile and irrelevant. Yet by supplying the needed insights to complete this blank, Innis became unintelligible. That is to say, he was stating actualities, which most scholars preferred to know nothing about.

One of the features of service environments is that two create less total service than one, or, in other words, the addition of service environments creates not increased service but a decrease of service.

The ground of any technology or artefact is both the situation that gives rise to it and the whole environment (medium) of services and disservices that it brings into play. These environmental side-effects impose themselves willy-nilly as a new form of culture. “The medium is the message.”

A primary method for studying the effects of anything is simply to imagine ourselves as suddenly deprived of them. If students were to interview physically deprived people about the effects of living in a world which has no place for a paraplegic, or a blind man, they would quickly apprehend the menace of our man-made service environment. They would soon discover that it is we ourselves who serve these environments.

Ordinarily cities, by addition of service environments, reduce service until it becomes drastically disservice. Additional service dislocates all the pre-existing ones, creating acute discomfort and disservice.

New bricks and mortar high-rise, relics of the nineteenth century, and “Elijah” Otis, produce “instant slums” a new dimension of disservice environment on the very edge of a new frontier, the end of “real” estate.

During periods of rapid innovation and the consequent interplay of new and old services there is a complementary flood of disruption and disservice.

After increasing beyond some point, any service becomes a disservice.

The nose cone that had been created for a single use thus proliferated a number of other materials and processes that quickly evoked new service/disservice environments.

In the warfare-welfare view of the state, warfare is simply the disservice side of welfare service environment.

If there is no private independent personal substance such as has always occupied the thought of the sages, then all matters of authority and obedience are frivolous, all service and disservice indifferent and equal.

They were less observant of the disservice environments that accompanied their innovations.

In sport there is no game without an audience. The greatest game minus an audience is a rehearsal which is quite the opposite of a replay. In sport there is usually a winner – i.e. both good and bad news, depending on publics. Sports, like weather, are dramatizings of the whole environment. Any game, as such, is a dramatization of the major motives of a community, be it ball or bull or ping pong. These actions are special environments that can be as totally involving as weather and stocks and war.