There is no privacy and no private parts. In a world in which we are all ingesting and digesting one another there can be no obscenity or pornography or decency. Such is the law of electric media which stretch the nerves to form a global membrane of enclosure.
“Notes on Burroughs” (1964) in Media Research (1997), p 89
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Was it not Bertrand Russell who said that if the bath water got only half a degree warmer every hour we wouldn't know when to scream? New environments [media] reset our sensory thresholds. These in turn, alter our outlook and expectations.
The need of our time is for the means of measuring sensory thresholds and of discovering exactly what changes occur in these thresholds as a result of the advent of any particular technology. ... We have no reason to be grateful to those who juggle the thresholds in the name of haphazard innovation.
“The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment,” The University of Windsor Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, (1966), p 10, reprinted in Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 253, and McLuhan Unbound #4, (2017), p 19
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Such a universality of conscious being for mankind was dreamt of by Dante, who believed that men would remain mere broken fragments until they should be united in an inclusive consciousness. What we have today, instead of a social consciousness electrically ordered, however, is a private subconsciousness or individual "point of view" rigorously imposed by older mechanical technology. This is a perfectly natural result of "culture lag" or conflict, in a world suspended between two technologies.