
Part 2, Ch. 4.
Household Papers and Stories (1864)
Ch 1: Medium is the Metaphor, p. 7
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)
Part 2, Ch. 4.
Household Papers and Stories (1864)
The Law of Mind (1892)
Context: The tendency to regard continuity, in the sense in which I shall define it, as an idea of prime importance in philosophy conveniently may be be termed synechism. The present paper is intended chiefly to show what synechism is, and what it leads to.
“The idea of changing culture is important to me, and it can only be done in a popular medium.”
"We Don’t Say Indian" in Slay Age (2005); also quoted in Ink-stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors: Superwomen in Modern Mythology (2010) by Jennifer K. Stuller
Context: If I made a series of lectures on PBS on why there should be feminism, no one would be coming to the party, and it would be boring. The idea of changing culture is important to me, and it can only be done in a popular medium.
Is Google Making us Stupid in The Atlantic, July 2008.
Context: The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author's words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas…. If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with 'content,' we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.
New Situation and the Policy of the Communist Party of Japan (1950)
Variant: Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.
Source: Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
Conditions of Liberty (1994)
Grip interview (1997)
Context: The most important of my achievements, if you want to call them that, was that I successfully introduced mystical ideas into pop culture, which was my obsession and my compulsion when I was 16 years old. So, behind all of this fame and fortune, there was a seeker, on a spiritual path — a young man who wanted to discover and share with others an alternative way of looking at the world. I wanted to save our culture from the stupidity and the bigotry and the ignorance that threatened it. And there was the Buddhist way, and the Celtic way.
“The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.”
Source: 1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970), p. 168