The Spectacle We Find In True Religions

A Metaphor Is Not An Ornament. It Is An Organ Of Perception. Through Metaphors, We See The World As One Thing Or Another.

Television Is Our Culture's Principal Mode Of Knowing About Itself. Therefore -- And This Is The Critical Point -- How Television Stages The World Becomes The Model For How The World Is Properly To Be Staged. It Is Not Merely That On The Television Screen Entertainment Is The Metaphor For All Discourse. It Is That Off The Screen The Same Metaphor Prevails. (92)

The Way In Which The Photograph Records Experience Is Also Different From The Way Of Language. Language Makes Sense Only When It Is Presented As A Sequence Of Propositions. Meaning Is Distorted When A Word Or Sentence Is, As We Say, Taken Out Of Context; When A Reader Or Listener Is Deprived Of What Was Said Before, And After. But There Is No Such Thing As A Photograph Taken Out Of Context, For A Photograph Does Not Require One. In Fact, The Point Of Photography Is To Isolate Images From Context, So As To Make Them Visible In A Different Way.

Embedded In Every Technology There Is A Powerful Idea, Sometimes Two Or Three Powerful Ideas. Like Language Itself, A Technology Predisposes Us To Favor And Value Certain Perspectives And Accomplishments And To Subordinate Others. Every Technology Has A Philosophy, Which Is Given Expression In How The Technology Makes People Use Their Minds, In How It Codifies The World, In Which Of Our Senses It Amplifies, In Which Of Our Emotional And Intellectual Tendencies It Disregards.

When Two Human Beings Get Together, They're Co-present, There Is Built Into It A Certain Responsibility We Have For Each Other, And When People Are Co-present In Family Relationships And Other Relationships, That Responsibility Is There. You Can't Just Turn Off A Person. On The Internet, You Can.