The absence of an image [of the other person] on the telephone is a great big positive potential of that medium that has never been tapped. It could be used to teaching mathematics to disadvantaged children and so on, to people who have no mathematical aptitude and so on.

In our own world, we are hurrying back and forth across town at morning and night to situations we could easily encompass by closed circuit. Why do the wheels keep hurrying us downtown? Some people are puzzled by this and have come up with the answer: it’s the filing cabinet downtown in the office that makes it still necessary to rush back and forth from suburbs to office. That it is this obsession with the contents of the file – documents, contracts, data. All of these materials could be just as available on closed circuit at home.

Liturgy on television affords every opportunity for full participation. It is possible to join one's intention to participate in the fullest extent, just as fully as in any church... Electric man has no ego and depends totally on close involvement with others. Similarly, electric liturgy would have no ego but a collective personality instead... The trouble with Christianity is that it has never had a theory of communication and a confrontation is fast developing between... the mystical body of the church and the electric environment.

Modem physicists are not aware of the acoustic character of the space which they now assign to "the chemical bond." Scientists are still embalmed in the old visual space that is uniform, continuous and connected.

Were we to teach our math and physics by telephone, even a highly literate and abstract Westerner could eventually compete with the European physicists.

The gap created by the "missing link" has sparked more exploration and discovery than the established links in "connected" science.

HARLEY PARKER: There is that lovely quotation, "A Japanese wife never quarrels with her husband, she merely rearrranges the flowers."
M. MCLUHAN: It is something that we would understand very little.

[T]he Chinese uses the blank, the interval between things; as the primary means of getting "in touch" with situations. Nothing could be more expressive of the properties of the right hemisphere in contrast to the left, for the left hemisphere "sees" space as an interval which must be logically connected, filled and bridged.