A McLuhan sourcebook 265 action of human perceiving and knowing. The new technology mimes the prime procedure of human learning and knowing.—1968 For rational beings to see or re-cognize their experience in a new material form is an unbought grace of life. Experience translated into a new medium literally bestows a delightful playback of earlier awareness. It is possible that our new technologies can bypass verbalizing. There is nothing inherently impossible in the computer, or that type of technology, extending consciousness itself—as a universal environment. There is a sense in which the surround of information that we now experience electrically is an extension of consciousness itself.—1970 New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media. These degradations happen when new media inevitably use older ones as content. Using the older ones as content hastens the tidying- up process by which a medium becomes an art form.—1964 Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the “content” of the other, obscuring the operation of both.—1964 The art of politics today requires an orchestral use of the varied instruments of public communication. The most ardent Beatlemaniac is quite unable to verbalize the meaning of the Beatles. In the same way a flag cannot involve if its symbols can be spelt out or verbalized. A flag issue that is raised and maintained on the level of editorial debate has no relevance to the function of flag.—1964 ENVIRONMENTS [Environment, from the Greek, perivello: to hit from all sides at once] Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.—1967 Cab Calloway: “When I walk down Eighth Avenue, man, I see rhythms, I don’t see downtown.” A prime feature of the environmental is its invisibility and unawareness. This seems to be involved in the very process of phylogeny. Each new stage of growth becomes the environment for all preceding stages. But we are aware only of the preceding stages, or, as it were, the content of the environment.—1964 The new environment reprocesses the old one as radically as TV is reprocessing film.—1964 The unconscious is a store of everything at once. When you begin to move information electrically, you begin to create a subconscious outside. —1967 We actually live in a world environment that now has the structure of our own subconscious lives…—1967 The sudden discovery of nature was made possible by the railway. At electric speeds of data processing, we become aware of environments for the first time. We call them “parameters.” It all began in electronic research when it was discovered that the instruments of