| Explanations | Essence (the real message) | Content/use (the irrelevant message) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| mechanization[4][13] | Provides human operators with machinery to assist them with the physical requirements of work. It is achieved "by fragmentation of any process and by putting the fragmented parts in a series". | The essence is the "technique of fragmentation". It is "fragmentary, centralist, and superficial" in its reshaping of human relationships. The decomposition makes a process into a sequence, which has no principle of causality. | the manufactured product (e.g. cornflakes or Cadillacs) |
| automation[4] | Uses machinery to replace human operators. | It is "integral and decentralist in depth" | the manufactured product (e.g.. cornflakes or Cadillacs) |
| movie[13] | Speeds up the mechanical (a sequence of frames) | With the "sheer speeding up the mechanical, it carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure. The message of the movie medium is that of transition from lineal connections to configuration." | |
| electricity[13][14] | The electric age | The instant speed of electricity brought simultaneity. It ended the sequencing/concatenation introduced by mechanization, and so "the causes of things began to emerge to awareness again". "The electric speed further takes over from mechanical movie sequences, then the lines of force in structures and in media become loud and clear. We return to the inclusive form of the icon." It imposed the shift from the approach of focusing on "specialized segments of attention" (adopting one particular perspective), to the idea of "instant sensory awareness of the whole", an attention to the "total field", a "sense of the whole pattern". It made evident and prevalent the sense of "form and function as a unity", an "integral idea of structure and configuration". This had major impact in the disciplines of painting (with cubism), physics, poetry, communication and educational theory. | |
| electric light[5] | - | "totally radical, pervasive, and decentralized... it eliminates time and space factors in human association exactly as do radio, telegraph, telephone, and TV, creating involvement in depth." | usually none. (although it can be used to "spell out some brand name") |
| electric power in industry[5] | - | the same as the electric light | (different from the electric light) |
| telegraph[5] | |||
| print and typography[5][8][15] | the new visual print culture | The message are the principles of uniformity, continuity, and linearity. Impact on human associations: the printed word, through "cultural saturation" in the 18th century, "homogenized the French nation, overlaying the complexities of ancient feudal and oral society";[16] this opened the way for the Revolution, which "was carried out by the new literati and lawyers". Limits on impact: it could not "take complete hold" on a society such as Great Britain, in which the preceding "ancient oral traditions of common law", that made the country culture so discontinuous and unpredictable and dynamic, was very powerful and "backed by the medieval legal institution of Parliament"; print culture, led instead to major revolutions in France and North America, because they were more linear and lacked contrasting institutions of comparable power. | the written word |
| writing[5] | speech | ||
| speech[5] | "It is an actual process of thought, which is in itself nonverbal" | ||
| radio[5] | |||
| telephone[5] | |||
| TV[5] | "It speaks, and yet says nothing."[17] | ||
| railway[5] | "it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure." | freight; "functioning in a tropical or a northern environment" | |
| airplane[5] | "by accelerating the rate of transportation, it tends to dissolve the railway form of city, politics, and association" | fast travel |
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