What I mean to point out here is that the introduction into a culture of a technique such as writing or a clock is not merely an extension of man's power to bind time but a transformation of his way of thinking--and, of course, of the content of his culture. And that is what I mean to say by calling a medium a metaphor. We are told in school, quite correctly, that a metaphor suggests what a thing is like by comparing it to something else. And by the power of its suggestion, it also fixes a conception in our minds that we cannot imagine the one thing without the other. 引自 The Medium Is the Mataphor
For example, the invention of eyeglasses in the twelfth century not only made it possible to improve defective vision but suggested the idea that human beings need not accept as final either the endowments of nature or the ravages of time. Eye glasses refuted the belief that anatomy is destiny by putting forward the idea that our bodies as well as our minds are improvable. 引自 The Medium Is the Mataphor