This is a new style of article, called the Quote Piece. The quote piece is to serve as a kaleidoscope around a central topic or collection of themes, rearranged in an order resembling the outline of an article if you squint, allowing the reader a broader interpretation of the message, while making exploration of the topic accessible. The Quote Piece is a cool media that forces the reader to fill in the gaps, explore the core writings further, and offers the reader different lenses to “try on” while keeping the core theme in the ground of the image.
The structure of the Quote Piece is quite simple. 80% of the characters must be quotes, the reader must have easy accessibility to these quotes by either directly linking to a digital version of the quote within the context of the entire book, or citing the book and page directly after the quote. The Quote Piece utilizes Headlines to direct the readers attention toward the important theme. It is an act of curation and cultivation, to be able to convey one’s own opinion, through the carefully constructed words of others. It may end with a “Quoda” a singular quote summarizing the key theme, a parting thought to ponder, or a concise outro to close the piece.
I hope you enjoy this Quote Piece that utilizes quotes from books, all written between 1960-1964, that provides many lenses for us to try on to understand our lives today centered around themes of mimesis, technology, and identities in crowds.
Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies
- Understanding Media p.45
The selection of a single sense for intense stimulus, or of a single extended, isolated, or amputated sense in technology, is in part the reason for the numbing effect that technology as such has on its makers and users. For the central nervous system rallies a response of general numbness to the challenge of specialized irritation.
- Understanding Media p.44
We have to numb our central nervous system when it is extended and exposed, or we will die. Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy. ... With such awareness, the subliminal life, private and social, has been hoicked up into full view, with the result that we have social consciousness presented to us as a cause of guilt-feelings. Existentialism offers a philosophy of structures, rather than categories, and of total social involvement instead of the bourgeois spirit of individual separateness or points of view. In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin.
- Understanding Media p.47
It is this continuous embrace of our own technology in daily use that puts us in the Narcissus role of subliminal awareness and numbness in relation to these images of ourselves. By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanism. That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions.
- Understanding Media p.46