Communication Medium Quotes

I think the written word is probably the best medium of communication because you have time to reflect, you have time to choose your words, to get your sentences exactly right. Whereas when you're being interviewed, say, you have to talk on the fly, you have to improvise, you can change sentences around, and they're not exactly right.

Television is, in many respects, a passive medium: people receive information without really exchanging ideas with others. By contrast, the Internet can be an active medium, allowing individuals to use e-mail, discussion groups, and even Web sites to engage with one another.

We need saints; we need this head - this talking head - to communicate. Every single religion you have people that go in-between, that can talk to god or communicate ideas. Then there are the talking heads in the news every time we watch TV. No matter how complex, you still need a person there to tell you what happened: a storyteller of sorts. I find that fascinating that we feel so attached to this primitive mode of connection, this primitive interface to the world.

You glance at an e-mail. You give more attention to a real letter.

I think there is an enormous diference between speaking and writing. One rereads what one writes. But one might read it slowly or quickly. In other words, you do not know how long you will have to spend deliberating over a sentence. ... But if I listen to a tape recorder, the listening time is determined by the speed at which the tape turns and not by my own needs.

I don't own a computer. I have a nine-foot piano in my home to compose my messages. Why would I want a one-foot computer to do the same thing?

What I'm constantly striving for in my prose is clarity. So that, ideally, the writing will become so transparent that the reader will forget that the medium of communication is language.

The radio for these women is like television is for us today, which is really like looking at the radio.

The balance of power shifts on the Internet to the individual. This is a two-way medium.

No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.

I grew up on radio, not TV.

This instrument [radio] can teach. It can illuminate, yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it's nothing but wires and lights in a box.

Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.

The same person is coming through in a different medium.... My art is simple, direct and definite.

Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them.

In a letter (no matter how quickly it is written or honestly or freely or lovingly) it is more possible to be loving and lovable, more possible to reach out and to take in ... I feel I have somehow deceived you into thinking this is really a human relationship. It is a letter relationship between humans.

Television [is] a high-impact medium. It does some things no other force can do-transmitting electronic pictures through the air. Still, as an explored, comprehensive medium, it is not a substitute for print.

Film as a medium, like a novel as a medium, possesses a unique ability to communicate. Film is capable of communicating in a way that no other medium can, and I would say the same for the novel.

There's a little bit more of a freedom when you're doing radio play-by-play as opposed to television. I prefer the television side of it.

We don't normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology.

A human being creates complexity by writing a novel on the surface of paper; a weather system creates complexity by writing waves on the surface of an ocean. What is the difference between the information carried in the words of a novel and the information carried on the waves of the sea? Listen, and the waves will speak, and someday, I tell you, you will write your thoughts on the surface of the sea.

Our great function is to inform or to inspire, or to please; to give to the public in the quickest and cheapest way information, inspiration, and recreation on the highest plane. If a better way than the books is found we should use it.

Modern presidential debating only started with Richard Nixon and John F.Kennedy in 1960, although the proximity of that to the Lincoln-Douglas centennial is more than accidental. The reason is, I think, the medium. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas were talking, but the talking was in terms of logic, development, and reasoning. Television, as a medium, resists those qualities in speaking - it favors quick cuts, one-liners, and talking points. I think the modern debates are largely the prisoners of the televised medium

Nothing was more valuable than the printed word.

A letter does not blush.