A McLuhan sourcebook 269 perspective and moved back into the highly tactual and iconic world of surrealism and modern art.—1964 MEDIA AS THEY AFFECT MEDIA A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them. —1964 One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information system. News bulletins, times signals, traffic data, above all weather reports, now serve to enhance the native power of radio to involve people in one another.—1964 The alphabet was one thing when applied to clay or stone, and quite another when set down on light papyrus.—1964 In the age of the photograph, language takes on a graphic or iconic character whose “meaning” belongs very little to the semantic universe, and not at all to the republic of letters.—1964 It was the telephone, paradoxically, that sped the commercial adoption of the typewriter. The phrase “send me a memo on that” repeated into millions of phones daily, helped to create the huge expansion of the typist function. —1964 It seems useful to consider the impact of Xerox if only because it illustrates how profoundly one technology can alter traditional patterns of relation between writing and speaking.—1973 Xerox extends the function of the typewriter almost to the point where the secret, personal memo is moved into the public domain, as with the Pentagon Papers. When notes for briefing individuals or groups are first typed and then Xeroxed, it is as if a private manuscript were put in the hands of the general reader. The typewriter plus photocopying thus, unexpectedly, restores many of the features of confidential handwritten records.—1973 Today the decentralizing of such institutions [as department stores] into a multiplicity of small shops in shopping plazas is partly the creation of the car, partly the result of TV.—1964 The BBC was set up to some extent, according to Innis, under the pressure of newspapers, post office, and various political pressures which felt that this form would be altogether too radical or mutational if it got out of hand. —1959 The newspaper that could advertise every sort of product on one page quickly gave rise to department stores that provided every kind of product under one roof.—1964