"This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium--that is, any extension of ourselves--result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology."
"For the "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and liesure."
"Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot."
" "Rational," of course, has for the West long meant "uniform and continuous and sequential." In other words, we have confused reason with literacy, and rationalism with a single technology. Thus in the electric age man seems to the conventional West to become irrational."
