A McLuhan sourcebook 271 theatre or when writing uses the voice. Hybridising or piggy-backing creates new chemical compounds like talking pictures or horseless carriages. —1971 In the case of any medium whatever, whether of language or clothing or radio or TV, it is the user himself who is the content, and it is the user alone who constitutes the experience of that service. No matter what is on TV, if the user is a Chinese, it is going to be a Chinese program, just as surely as a movie on TV is experienced as a TV show.—1974 You are the content of any extension of yourself, whether it be pin or pen, pencil or sword, be it palace or page, song or dance or speech… The meaning of all these is the experience of using these extensions of yourself. Meaning is not “content” but an active relationship.—1971 The user is always the content, at least in the traditional Aristotelean view that the “cognitive agent itself becomes and is the thing known.” —1975 I.A.Richards’s… Practical Criticism was a series of revelations about what people do when they actually read [a poem]. They turn it into whatever happens to suit them. —1978 The reader “puts on” the poem as a mask. He becomes its “content” by adjusting himself to use the poem as a means of perceiving the world. —1974 II. MEDIA EVOLUTION, MEDIA FORMS PATTERNS IN MEDIA EVOLUTION In short, any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening new doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind. —1964 Every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience.—1947 The new technology mimes the prime procedure of human learning and knowing.—1968 Physiologically, man in his normal use of technology, or his variously extended body, is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology.—1964 Until 1700 more than 50 per cent of all printed books were ancient or medieval. Not only antiquity but also the Middle Ages were given to the first reading public of the printed word. And the medieval texts were by far the most popular.—1964 At the very beginning, in 1450, the printed word already had all the essential characteristics of modern movies. The movie today is at once a