Source: Revolution for the Hell of It (1968), p. 109, quoting the famous statement of Marshall McLuhan.
Context: STRUCTURE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN CONTENT IN THE TRANSMISSION OF INFORMATION. It is the same as saying "the medium is the message."
Source: Blood Music (1985), Chapter 45 (p. 237)
General System Theory (1968), 4. Advances in General Systems Theory
Source: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.1, p. 36
Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 160
"Information Management: A Proposal" https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html (March 1989), the original proprosal for the software project at CERN that became the World Wide Web.
Context: We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities. The aim would be to allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterwards. The result should be sufficiently attractive to use that it the information contained would grow past a critical threshold, so that the usefulness the scheme would in turn encourage its increased use. The passing of this threshold accelerated by allowing large existing databases to be linked together and with new ones.
The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)
Context: I want you to understand what has been done in the world to force men to think alike. It seems to me that if there is some infinite being who wants us to think alike he would have made us alike. Why did he not do so? Why did he make your brain so that you could not by any possibility be a Methodist? Why did he make yours so that you could not be a Catholic? And why did he make the brain of another so that he is an unbeliever — why the brain of another so that he became a Mohammedan — if he wanted us all to believe alike?
After all, maybe Nature is good enough and grand enough and broad enough to give us the diversity born of liberty. Maybe, after all, it would not be best for us all to be just the same. What a stupid world, if everybody said yes to everything that everybody else might say.
The most important thing in this world is liberty. More important than food or clothes — more important than gold or houses or lands — more important than art or science — more important than all religions, is the liberty of man.
“Disintegration of structure equals information loss.”
The Snark, a member of a machine-intelligence civilization, p. 195
In the Ocean of Night (1977)
Michael Halliday Notes on transitivity and theme in English: Part 2, 1967. p. 200 cited in: Klaus von Heusinger "Information Structure and the Partition of Sentence Meaning". In: Eva Hajičová (2002) Form, Meaning and Function. p. 287
1950s–1960s
Page 70.
The Revolution Will Be Digitised: Dispatches From the Information War, 1st Edition
"Legislators of the world" in The Guardian (18 November 2006) http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1950812,00.html
Context: I'm both a poet and one of the "everybodies" of my country. I live with manipulated fear, ignorance, cultural confusion and social antagonism huddling together on the faultline of an empire. I hope never to idealise poetry — it has suffered enough from that. Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard. There is no universal Poetry, anyway, only poetries and poetics, and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they belong. There is room, indeed necessity, for both Neruda and César Valléjo, for Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alfonsina Storni, for both Ezra Pound and Nelly Sachs. Poetries are no more pure and simple than human histories are pure and simple. And there are colonised poetics and resilient poetics, transmissions across frontiers not easily traced.
