Essential McLuhan 268 Bad news reveals the character of change; good news does not.—1966 [Joyce showed how to] make an inventory of all the effects of the new thing as it encounters all the older forms of the society.—1967 The understanding of media as art forms is achieved by translation of one medium into another.—1960 Today we can test the contrast between radio and TV in a variety of ways. We have only to imagine what might be the effects of video-phone on the telephone to perceive the utter diversity of these media.—1971 If you wanted to study radio as a medium in its impact on society, you would do well to look at what happens to radio in a movie. What use is there made of radio in the movie? What happens to a telephone in a Broadway play?—1959 The best way to study the nature of any medium is to study its effect on other media because you can see them spelled out there. So when you study the effect of TV on sports, then you begin to understand the nature of TV. And when you see its effects on politics, in advertising, and in movies, then you begin to understand it.—1977 HYBRID MEDIA The hypertrophy of written messages, which has been dubbed “Parkinson’s law” by its author, would appear to be caused not by paper- shuffling and the typewriter, but by the effort of the typewriter to keep pace with the acceleration of information movement created by the telephone and electronic media. —1960 The hybrid or meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born.—1964 The electric typewriter is a contradiction in terms. It is a hybrid of the fragmentary and the integral. Our world is filled with such hybrids. The internal combustion engine is such a hybrid.—1964 The telegraph is an electric form that, when crossed with print and rotary presses, yields the modern newspaper.—1964 And the photograph is not a machine, but a chemical and light process that, crossed with the machine, yields the movie.—1964 One of the most common causes of breaks in any system is the cross- fertilization with another system, such as happened to print with the steam press, or with radio and movies (which yielded the talkies). Artists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium to use or to release the power of another.—1964 Dickens, by using the newspaper as the content of the older novel form, created a new hybrid of great power. As usual, when the new medium swallowed an older one, conventional taste protested that vulgarization had occurred. Paradoxically, Dickens, by pushing the camera eye to a point of high fidelity, broke out of the domain of