Essential McLuhan 272 fulfillment and a kind of reversal of the nature of print invented five hundred years ago.—1959 The “flickers,” as the movies were once called, are really built into the printed form. The printed form is itself a flicker in which you are constantly transferring from this shot to that shot. This shot, the image lingers while you look at that one, and while you look at the next one, there’s a fingering, wavering, doubtful no-man’s land. —1959 Edwin Schrödinger has explained how he and his fellow physicists had agreed that they would report their new discoveries and experiments in quantum physics in the language of the old Newtonian physics. That is, they agreed to discuss and to report the non-visual, electronic world in the language of the visual world of Newton. —1974 TV is a new start, like the invention of writing itself. But the movie is in a sense the final stage of the Gutenberg revolution; for the movie is a mechanical, not an electronic, form. And print was the first mechanization of a handicraft, the first form of mass production by exact repetition.— 1958 Television may be as decisively the successor to writing as oral speech was the predecessor of writing. —1955 The television environment has steadily upgraded the old movie forms into sentimentally valued art forms. The medieval world got the same treatment from the Gutenberg technology.—1966 We have here today, the electronic equipment (TV) that is translating us into software instantaneously and enables us to be played back as software instantaneously.—1978 The new environment of mankind is scarcely “hardware” or physical so much as it is information and the configurations of codified data.— 1966 But whereas the age of photo, radio, and movie was the period of fission in media and marketing, with TV we now move into the age of fusion and, even psychically, the hydrogen bomb. The message of TV is of interfusion, implosion, and integral effort.—1961 As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of “do it yourself.”—1957 LANGUAGE AND SPEECH The great and abiding mass medium is not literature but speech. Language is at once the most vulgar of all media and the greatest work of art that ever can be devised by man.