On Lewis Mumford re: the clock: "The clock...is a piece of power machinery whose 'product' is seconds and minutes...Beginning in the fourteenth century, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded" (12).

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On innovation & tools: "...in every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself. It has been pointed out, for example, that the invention of eyeglasses in the 12th century not only made it possible to improve defective vision, but suggested the idea that human beings need not accept as final either the endowments of nature or the ravages of time" (14).

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On media as epistemology: "My argument is limited to saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content -- in a phrase, by creating a new forms of truth -telling" (27).

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Information Action Ratio: "By generating an abundance of irrelevant information, [the TV] dramatically altered what may be called the 'information action ratio'. In both oral and typographic cultures, information derives its importance from the possibilities of action...But the situation created by telegraphy and then exacerbated by later technologies, made the relationship between information and action both abstract and remote. For the first time in human history, people were faced with the problem of information glut, which means that simultaneously they were faced with the problem of a diminished social and political potency...Everything became everyone's business. For the first time we were sent information which answered no question we had asked and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply....Telegraphy also made public discourse essentially incoherent...It brought into being a world of broken time and broken attention to use Lewis Mumford's phrase" (68-69).

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On the Telegraph: "The telegraph introduced a kind of public conversation whose form had startling characteristics: its language was the language of headlines -- sensational, fragmented, impersonal....Knowing the facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that one understood implications, background, or connections....To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing OF lots of things, not knowing ABOUT them" (71).

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"Now....This": "There is no murder so brutal, no earthquake so devastating...that cannot be erased from our minds by the newscaster saying 'Now....This'....In part because TV sells its time in seconds and minutes, in part because TV must use images rather than words, in part because its audience can move freely to and from the TV set, programs are structured so that each eight-minute segment may stand as a complete event itself" (100).

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On disinformation: "What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information -- misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information -- information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing....I do not mean to imply that TV news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packages as entertainment, that this is the inevitable result" (107).

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