Essential McLuhan 266 observation distorted the data. Now we know that any environment acts like the instrument of observation.—1964 The simultaneous insists upon the harmonious.—1957 The present is always invisible because it’s environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.—1967 We can always see the Emperor’s old clothes, but not his new ones.— 1965 Electric technology offers, perhaps for the first time, a means of dealing with the environment itself as a direct instrument of vision and knowing. All human technology begins as an immediate service or aid to some existing function and this aid quickly develops its own field of associated services and activities which, in turn, create new services and satisfactions. —1973 While environments as such have a strange power to elude perception, the preceding ones acquire an almost nostalgic fascination when surrounded by the new. This is nowhere more evident than in the art of photography with its power to invest all human artifacts with the quality of art.—1967 One of the features of service environments is that two create less total service than one, or, in other words, the addition of service environments creates not increased service but a decrease of service.—1970 Apropos “the medium is the message” I now point out that the medium is not the figure but the ground, not the motor car but the highways and the factories. Also, I point out that in all media the user is the content, and the effects come before the invention. —1973 It may even be that the loss of one’s power to recognize new patterns of power in the environment is in direct ratio to the impact of such new powers. We are most nearly numb where impact is most severe… A.J. Toynbee has few if any instances of societies meeting the challenge of major change successfully.—1964 Whether it be recognized as radio or television or Telstar or the bomb, the new environment of mankind is scarcely “hardware” or physical so much as it is information and the configurations of codified data.—1966 HOW NEW ENVIRONMENTS RESHAPE OLDER ENVIRONMENTS You have to perceive the consequences of the new environment on the old environment before you know what the new environment is. When a new environment forms, we see the old one as if we lived in a world of the déjà vu. This was, of course, Plato’s theory of knowledge,