HOW TO STUDY MEDIA

You must be literate in umpteen media to be really  literate nowadays. 
		 1966

Understanding several media simultaneously is the best way of 
approaching any one of them.

A primary method for studying the effects of anything is simply to 
imagine ourselves as suddenly deprived of them. If students were to 
interview physically deprived people about the effects on them of 
living in a world which has no place for a paraplegic, or a blind man, 
they would quickly apprehend the menace of our man-made service 
environment.  1974

Bad news reveals the character of change; good news does not.  1966

[Joyce showed how to] make an inventory of all the effects of the new 
thing as it encounters all the older forms of the society.  1967

Today we can test the contrast between radio and TV in a variety of 
ways. We have only to imagine what might be the effects of video-phone 
on the telephone to perceive the utter diversity of these media.  1971

The best way to study the nature of any medium is to study its effect 
on other media because you can see them spelled out there. So when you 
study the effect of TV on sports, then you begin to understand the 
nature of TV. And when you see its effects on politics, in 
advertising, and in movies, then you begin to understand it.  1977


HYBRID MEDIA

The hypertrophy of written messages, which has been dubbed  Parkinsons 
law by its author, would appear to be caused not by paper-shuffling 
and the typewriter, but by the effort of the typewriter to keep pace 
with the accelera tion of information movement created by the 
telephone and electronic media. 		 1960

The hybrid or meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation 
from which new form is born.  1964

The electric typewriter is a contradiction in terms. It is a hybrid of 
the fragmentary and the integral. Our world is filled with such 
hybrids. The internal combustion engine is such a hybrid.  1964

One of the most common causes of breaks in any system is the 
cross-fertilization with another system, such as happened to print 
with the steam press, or with radio and movies (which yielded the 
talkies).

Artists in various fields are always the first to discover how to 
enable one medium to use or to release the power of another.  1964

Dickens, by using the newspaper as the content of the older novel 
form, created a new hybrid of great power. As usual, when the new 
medium swallowed an older one, conventional taste protested that 
vulgarization had occurred. Paradoxically, Dickens, by pushing the 
camera eye to a point of high fidelity, broke out of the domain of 
perspective and moved back into the highly
tactual and iconic world of surrealism and modern art.  1964