Essential McLuhan 264 All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values.—1964 The effects of new media on our sensory lives are similar to the effects of new poetry. They change not our thoughts but the structure of our world.—1969 (To Mike Wallace) If I turn off this mike my relationship to you is changed instantly.—1966 BURSTING BOUNDARIES Today the boundaries between inner and outer forces of the media are confused. And our four-century preoccupation with print has fixed our attention on so limited an aspect of the media that we find it very hard to release our attention to the whole range of media influence. What I wish to show is that today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate men faced with the advent of writing.—1955 Personally, I think that the effect of the telegraph has been…to break down the division between our inner and outer worlds.—1956 There is no inside or outside under electronic conditions. That is the meaning of our glass buildings, the new banking services.—1970 The dichotomy between information and entertainment has ended.— 1962 What we call entertainment at the present time is really, basically, a form of politics. There is really far more politics in Hollywood in the consumer attitudes and personal preferences and goals as set by casting bureaus and so on, far more political reality in the Hollywood scene than there ever has been in the so-called political scene. —1966 The media themselves are the avantgarde of our society. Avant-garde no longer exists in painting and music and poetry, it’s the media themselves. —1973 With the telegraph and after, we enter the world of interdependence and inter-action, in which no medium has its meaning alone and no product or advertisement has its meaning or use by itself.—1967 DEVELOPING THE POTENTIAL OF NEW MEDIA [F.D.R.] was at great pains to use an unfavourable press to enhance his radio image. The art of politics today requires an orchestral use of the varied instruments of public communication. These instruments do not exist or function in isolation from one another any more than do our senses function in isolation.—1965 Circuitry means that every situation must fold back into itself much in the pattern of cognition and its playback, which is “recognition” in the