A McLuhan sourcebook 263 recover that older world we can do so only by an intensive study of the ways in which the media have swallowed it.—1956 AS NEW LANGUAGES… Today we are beginning to realize that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression.—1957 If a language contrived and used by many people is a mass medium, any one of our new media is in a sense a new language, a new codification of experience collectively achieved by new work habits and inclusive collective awareness.—1960 New media may at first appear as mere codes of transmission for older achievement and established patterns of thought. But nobody could make the mistake of supposing that phonetic writing merely made it possible for the Greeks to set down in visual order what they had thought and known before writing. In the same way printing made literature possible. It did not merely encode literature.—1960 Ads, comics, and movies are not codes in North America but basic languages. That we have not yet begun to teach their grammars is as natural as it is for pre-literate man to ignore the written or visual mode of his language. Grammar comes from the Greek “written.” And education would seem to involve the translation of experience into a new mode.— 1960 It is the framework that changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame. The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way. We must maximize rather than minimize the various features of our new media. It is easy now to see that they are not mere vehicles for alreadyachieved experience and insight. Gramophone and movies were merely the mechanization of speech and gesture. But the radio and TV were not just the electronification of speech and gesture but the electronification of the entire range of human personal expressiveness. With electronification the flow is taken out of the wire and into the vacuum tube circuit, which confers freedom and flexibility such as are in metaphor and in words themselves.—1955 Each new technology creates an environment that is itself regarded as corrupt and degrading yet the new one turns its predecessor into an art form. —1964 The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie. The form and tone of some press styles may make the very concept of truth irrelevant. The most urgent and reliable facts presented in this way are a travesty of any reality. —1955