Essential McLuhan 270 Yet does General Motors, for example, know, or ever suspect, anything about the effect of the TV image on the users of their motor cars?—1964 With the rise of statistics as a means of persuasion in 1830s, parliamentary oratory took a nose dive. Gladstone appears to have been the first to master statistics as a form of oratory. The advent of radio in the same way was fatal to political oratory, for one cannot orate into microphone.—1957 MEDIA FUSING FUNCTIONS The typewriter fuses composition and publication, causing an entirely new attitude to the written and printed word. Composing on the typewriter has altered the forms of the language and literature.—1974 Like the typewriter, the telephone fuses functions, enabling the callgirl, for example, to be her own procurer and madame.—1964 The very nature of the telephone, as of all electric media, is to compress and unify that which had previously been divided and specialized. Only the authority of knowledge works by telephone because of the speed that creates a total and inclusive field of relations.—1964 The poet or novelist now composes on the typewriter. The typewriter now fuses composition and publication, causing an entirely new attitude to the written and printed word.—1964 MEDIA REPROCESSING MEDIA When television becomes an old technology, we will really understand and appreciate its glorious properties. —1967 The history of the arts and sciences could be written in terms of the continuing process by which new technologies create new environments for old technologies.—1964 Swift’s A Tale of a Tub used the new world of print to enclose the preceding world of the sermon and theological exegesis. Swift is aware of the conflict of forms somewhat in the manner of Mad Magazine today. —1964 It is not surprising that these new [electrical] forms have beaten the book into the pulps, just as the book destroyed the manuscript and the great culture linked to it. In 1831 the French poet Lamartine foresaw that the newspaper was the book and the poetry of the future. THE USER AS CONTENT OF A MEDIUM When one medium uses another, it is the user that is the “content.” When motor cars ride on freight cars, the car is using the railway, and the car is the “content” of the railway, and also of the highway. So it is when print uses the manuscript, or when TV uses the movie, or when movie uses the