"Culture has so come to mean its loftier dicta (like literature and the arts) that we have needed a Marshall McLuhan to remind us that the medium itself is the message. And the message is: metamorphosis. We are being shaped by the tools we shape; and culture is the way of life being impressed on a community by its technics."

"...we are not quite conscious of the reason for our disdain when we refer to the illiterate past as wallowing in ignorance.... What divides us from them is the column of print. Theirs was a total culture involving all the senses, while ours is a culture concentrated in the literate eye."