Quotes & Sayings About Electronic Media

By the way, goals and objectives are meaningless at the speed of light. At the speed of light, you aren't going somewhere, you're already there. On the telephone you're not going somewhere, you're there. And in the electronic world, going somewhere, you're there. And in the electronic world, there are no goals or objectives, we're already there.
McLuhan CD-ROM — Marshall McLuhan

I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media. — Milton Babbitt

Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups ... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. — Philip K. Dick

The level of intelligence has been tremendously increased, because people are thinking and communicating in terms of screens, and not in lettered books. Much of the real action is taking place in what is called cyberspace. People have learned how to boot up, activate, and transmit their brains.
Essentially, there's a universe inside your brain. The number of connections possible inside your brain is limitless. And as people have learned to have more managerial and direct creative access to their brains, they have also developed matrices or networks of people that communicate electronically. There are direct brain/computer link-ups. You can just jack yourself in and pilot your brain around in cyberspace-electronic space. — Timothy Leary

News at Work is a vivid, inside look at the collision of print journalism and electronic media. Based on close access to the leading news organizations in Buenos Aires, Boczkowski documents how contemporary journalism is caught in the grip of emulation; this spiral of imitation exacerbated further by global news media and their intensifying homogenization. The portrait of this transformation of the news is both fascinating and deeply worrying, and is guaranteed to provoke debate. — Walter W. Powell

Television and radio are what I call sequential media; they're not simultaneous media. With simultaneous media, you can scan your eye down an electronic or print page and pick among six or seven stories you might like and want to read. With television and radio, you have to wait until the guy's finished talking about the balloon boy, which I don't have the slightest interest in, to find out that all hell's broken loose in Baghdad. Because they've chosen that day to start with the balloon boy. — Harold Evans

The world is beset by many problems, but in my opinion, this hijacking of our brain's reward centers by electronic media is potentially one of the most destructive. — Andrew Weil

In this age of the electronic media and the mass distribution of the printed word, God will hold us accountable if we do not now move the Book of Mormon in a monumental way. — Ezra Taft Benson

The thing about social media is that it is anonymous, so it can be much more vitriolic and extreme than normal media and yet it is there for everyone to see. It is kind of like electronic graffiti. The political process is accelerated and intense in a way that I don't believe it ever really has been before. — Tony Abbott

The modern wars are also omnipresent in our electronic media - to be cynical about it, we now have 24 hours of non-stop bloodshed available to us. The internet and real-time media reporting were integrated into daily life in Iraq. — Dave Abrams

The electronic media introduced this idea to the larger audience very, very quickly. We spent years and years and years meeting with activists all over Europe to lay the groundwork for a political response, as we did here. — Jeremy Rifkin

With technology expanding at this ridiculous pace, bit by bit we're losing our humanity and our ability to connect with each other without having electronic media in the middle. — Walter Trout

Contention, especially violence, is not the way to deal with our problems. Unfortunately, television, videos, movies, and electronic games teach otherwise. Even cartoons and many children's programs depict violence in amusing ways, suggesting that no one really gets hurt and that any disagreement can be solved by a karate kick or the use of some weapon. — Harold Anthony Oaks

A first hint of the power of the electronic media to bring disaster directly into living rooms came with the radio broadcast of the explosion of the zeppelin "Hindenburg," in 1937 ... — R. W. Apple

South Central Los Angeles, for example, is a data and media black hole, without local cable programming or links to major data systems. Just as it became a housing-and-jobs ghetto in the postwar period, it is now evolving into an off-net electronic ghetto. — Mike Davis

America today remembers its history through visual imagery. Film, print, and electronic media are very capital intensive, which means that most Americans are consumers, not producers, of the images through which they remember. — Jerry Lembcke

It is proper Netiquette to post pictures with status updates to make them more engaging. — David Chiles

One survey that I saw that was published I think in Variety or Electronic Media within the last three weeks says that now the average hour of radio in the United States has 18 minutes of commercials. — Robert McChesney

Myth Number 4: Social Media Is the Shiny New Thing. Two Years from Now, That Bubble Will Burst Yes, it is the shiny new thing. No, two years from now, that bubble will not burst. There is no bubble. What social media represents is an evolution in the field of communications, just as the Internet and mobility before it. The tools will change, the platforms will evolve, but the way in which people communicate with other people through digital networks and electronic devices has been fundamentally transformed through the development of social media. We did not grow tired of the telephone, of the ... — Olivier J. Blanchard

Communication media enabled collective action on new scales, at new rates, among new groups of people, multiplied the power available to civilizations and enabled new forms of social interaction. The alphabet enabled empire and monotheism, the printing press enabled science and revolution, the telephone enabled bureaucracy and globalization, the internet enabled virtual communities and electronic markets, the mobile telephone enabled smart mobs and tribes of info-nomads. — Howard Rheingold

There is no money in what is aptly called free association: we are instead encouraged by media and advertising to fear each other and regard public life as a danger and a nuisance, to live in secured spaces, communicate by electronic means, and acquire our information from media rather than each other. — Rebecca Solnit

Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that's electronic and sex that's cyberspaced, untouched money and computer-safe sex, the convergence of consumer desire
not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices. — Don DeLillo

We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, 'What is real?' Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. — Philip K. Dick

Contrary to the tenets of conventional wisdom, viral ideas and campaigns were not first transmitted via the electronic media of the Internet age. Their ideological forebears lived and replicated in the host coffee-houses, inns and taverns of the early eighteenth-century. — Gavin John Adams

I get most of my news updates from electronic and social media. — LeVar Burton

When I started, DJs weren't in the media, electronic music wasn't in the sales charts and a DJ was the freak in the corner who provided the music while other people had fun. So to do it, you must have been a freak and a music lover. — Paul Van Dyk

Misinformation and disinformation about ritual abuse and mind control trauma and psychotherapy to treat such trauma appear in both paper and electronic media, but are particularly abundant on the Internet on websites of individuals and organizations, bookseller reviews, blogs, newsletters, online encyclopedias, social networking sites, and e-group listservs. — Ellen P. Lacter

The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community. — Marshall McLuhan

There have been vast changes in the composition and role of the news media over the decades, and that is a cause for concern as well. When I first entered government nearly forty-eight years ago, three television networks and a handful of newspapers dominated coverage and, to a considerable degree, filtered the most extreme or vitriolic points of view. Today, with hundreds of cable channels, blogs, and other electronic media, too often the professional integrity and long-established standards and practices of journalists are diluted or ignored. Every point of view - including the most extreme - has a ready vehicle for rapid dissemination. And it seems the more vitriolic the opinion, the more attention it gets. This system is clearly more democratic and open, but I believe it has also fueled the coarsening and dumbing down of our national political dialogue. — Robert M. Gates

What I'm driving at is let's not lose sight in our excitement of the democratization of the media that some things are bad, false and ugly - and no amount of electronic gloss will make them true, beautiful and accurate. — Harold Evans

The information superhighways will have the same effect as our present superhighways or motorways. They will cancel out the landscape, lay waste to the territory and abolish real distances. What is merely physical and geographical in the case of our motorways will assume its full dimensions in the electronic field with the abolition of mental distances and the absolute shrinkage of time. All short circuits (and the establishment of this planetary hyper-space is tantamount to one immense short circuit) produce electric shocks. What we see emerging here is no longer merely territorial desert, but social desert, employment desert, the body itself being laid waste by the very concentration of information. A kind of Big Crunch, contemporaneous with the Big Bang of the financial markets and the information networks. We are merely at the dawning of the process, but the waste and the wastelands are already growing much faster than the computerization process itself. — Jean Baudrillard

I wouldn't encourage new writers to start off publishing through electronic media ... it still isn't wide enough for the readership they would need to get a good start. — Anne McCaffrey

The public owns the airwaves; Congress gave them to broadcasters for free, with the understanding that they would serve the public interest while trying to maximize profit. An aspect of serving the public is to use the immense power of electronic media to reflect evolving standards of respect for other people. — Reed Hundt

For some hippies, this vision could only be realised by rejecting scientific progress as a false God and returning to nature. Others, in contrast, believed that technological progress would inevitably turn their libertarian principles into social fact. Crucially, influenced by the theories of Marshall McLuhan, these technophiliacs thought that the convergence of media, computing and telecommunications would inevitably create the electronic agora - a virtual place where everyone would be able to express their opinions without fear of censorship. Despite being a middle-aged English professor, McLuhan preached the radical message that the power of big business and big government would be imminently overthrown by the intrinsically empowering effects of new technology on individuals. — Richard Barbrook

Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print, literary studies have been slow to wake up to the importance of MSA (media-specific analysis). Literary criticism and theory are shot through with unrecognized assumptions specific to print. Only now, as the new medium of electronic textuality vibrantly asserts its presence, are these assumptions clearly coming into view. — N. Katherine Hayles

Erwin Schrodinger has explained how he and his fellow physicists had agreed that they would report their new discoveries and experiments in quantum physics in the language of Newtonian physics. That is, they agreed to discuss and report the non-visual, electronic world in the language of the visual world of Newton. — Marshall McLuhan

Performance art can involve the audience with taste, smell and sounds not available with electronic media and not practical with conventional theater. This is due to the usually small audience. — Jack Bowman

There is a line between scurrilous nonsense and serious discussion that laps over, especially in this day and age when you've got all this electronic media and these blogs and this kind of fanatical impulse to bring down the opposing candidate. — Robert Dallek

Historically, more media has been consumed sitting in front of the television than any other device. Controlling this screen has been the goal of major technology, consumer electronic, and telecommunications companies. — Jay Samit

USA belongs to a handful of men who also control the media. Look at General Electric. It produces nuclear weapons for the Pentagon and also owns the NBC News cable channel, which is a very sophisticated censure apparatus, intrinsic to the system. It's genius. It's like an electronic cage around the nation which blocks information from getting through. — Gore Vidal

What's really going on here is, this is a media shift. It's comparable to what happened in the 1950s and the birth of electronic mass media back then.This is the birth of a new kind of personal media, where, instead of we're all watching one program, we're all watching each other. And the history of media makes it really clear. Whenever we have a big innovation, the first wave of stuff we do is pretty crummy. The printing press gave us pornography, cheap thrillers, and how-to books. Television gave us Newt Minow's vast wasteland. — Esther Dyson

Old media companies will be further challenged in the next 15 years, as a new wave of user-generated content washes over the Internet, thanks to the increasing availability and affordability of portable, digital-based electronic devices. The cameraphones which seemed like such novelties just a few years ago will be in everyone's purse and pocket a few years from now. — Ian Lamont

Every medium - oral, written, print, and now electronic - has its own associated thought patterns and mind sets. — Dale Spender

I think the focus of the media changes. At the moment the more electronic stuff like trip-hop was the flavor of the month, just a little while ago. It all depends on the angle, from which point of view you see it. — Stephen Malkmus

People are more likely to search for specific books in which they are actively interested and that justify all of that effort of reading them. Electronic images and sounds, however, thrust themselves into people's environments, and the messages are received with little effort. In a sense, people must go after print messages, but electronic messages reach out and touch people. People will expose themselves to information in electronic media that they would never bother to read about in a book. — Joshua Meyrowitz

Avoid demonizing television, computer games, and new technologies. Electronic media may compete for kids' attention, but we're not going to get kids reading by badmouthing other entertainment. Admit that TV and games can do things books can't. — Jon Scieszka