All contemporary decision making confirms the habits of the past in reacting with a futile attempt to adjust. Reaction is the age-old attempt to adjust to the old, which is seen as “present” and “future.” At instant speeds all reaction and adjustment are inevitable, too late to be relevant. To keep up we must be far ahead.

As we approach “instant” speeds of information, we have no choice but to anticipate the pattern of change itself.

The entire use of yes-no bit programming is from the alphabetic modes of Western civilization. But many people look to the computer to bypass present forms of human action and limitation. Yet, even the written and printed word, it might be argued, has helped us to surpass ordinary human scale.

Any individual who manipulates the public for his private good may also feel the cleansing power of publicity.

Yet whether one uses the press for privacy in public conveyances, or for involvement in the communal while enjoying privacy, the mosaic of the press manages to effect a complex many-leveled function of group-awareness and participation such as the book has never been able to perform.

The simple faith of the salesman in the irresistibility of his line (both talk and goods) now yields to the complex togetherness of the corporate posture, the process and the organization.

T. S Eliot from Prufrock on pursues the same comic vision of man as a servo-mechanism harnessed to his own image.

The Scientific Systems of the Technical Age have become Art Forms.

To keep up with we must be far ahead. It would have been proper to say “ahead with the poets and the artists,” if they had not become so eager to adjust to the consumer mores. Not they are what we have to adjust to. Whereas the arts used to be navigational, the role of the arts can no longer be the same in the satellite age, when the Earth has become an art form itself.

[Said of H.A.Innis, equally true of himself]
Innis sacrificed point of view and prestige to his sense of the urgent need for insight and understanding.

The function of music is to translate the sounds of the environment through language, to humanize the technology of the metropolis by translating those sounds in all their raucous disorder, translating them through the rhythms of a great language.

Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology.

The format of the press—that is, its structural characteristics —were quite naturally taken over b y the poets after Baudelaire in order to evoke an inclusive awareness. Our ordinary newspaper page today is not only symbolist and surrealist in an avant-garde way, but it was the earlier inspiration of symbolism and surrealism in art and poetry, as anybody can discover by reading Flaubert or Rimbaud. Approached as newspaper form, any part of Joyce's Ulysses or any poem of T . S. Eliot's before the Quartets is more readily enjoyed.

The subject of nationalism and print has been held back until now lest it usurp the entire book. It will be the easier to handle the complex of issues now that we have encountered similar groupings of issues in quite different areas of experience. The present volume to this point might be regarded as a gloss on a single text of Harold Innis: “The effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century.”

Yeats was allowed to wear his own mask on condition that he never showed his face except to his friends.

The paradox is that as services for everyone become environmental, private services for anyone vanish. We return to do-it-yourself.