Essential McLuhan 280 about a mysterious change in everyday experience. The movie reconstructs the external daylight world and in so doing provides an interior dream world.—1954 You see, the camera extends your feet and your eyes; a movie camera carries your eyes out on your feet into the world—it’s mobile. And TV doesn’t do that; it doesn’t extend your eyes and your feet, it extends your eyes and your hands: it feels, it handles, it scans the environment, by scanning, by handling.—1966 TV has processed the old movie into a widely heralded avant-garde form. The movie is no longer an environmental form. It is the “content” of TV. Thus it has become a harmless consumer commodity that is no longer regarded as corrupt and degrading. That designation is always reserved for whatever is actively environmental.—1965 In David Copperfield, [Dickens] experimented with the eyes of a child as if they were a camera turned on the adult world. To see the adult world as a live process unfolding mysteriously to the child’s awareness was a notable degree of anticipation of film form and camera eye. D.W.Griffiths recognized this and habitually carried a volume of Dickens with him on location. He would sit down and open his Dickens in the midst of shooting a film in order to discover new ways of solving his problems.— 1964 NEWSPAPER The modern newspaper is a magical institution like the rainmaker. It is written to release feelings and to keep us in a state of perpetual emotion. It is not intended to provide rational schemes or patterns for digesting the news. It never provides insights into events, but merely the thrill of the event. People don’t actually read newspapers, they step into them like a warm bath. Take the date line off a newspaper and it becomes an exotic and fascinating surrealist poem. [On bad polling predictions] It’s noticed in Britain too; the pollsters had a bad time. In the last two elections, they came off very badly. I think they are asking newspaper questions—high-definition questions about your point of view on this candidate, that candidate.—1960 Man uses the press for privacy in public conveyances.—1967 Most trivial matters are given considerable additional intensity by being translated into prose at all. That is why no account of anything can be “truthful” in a newspaper.—1970 The unformulated message of an assembly of news items from every quarter of the globe is that the world today is one city. All war is civil war. All suffering is our own.—1954