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I think that everybody tries to produce what Marshall McLuhan called a ‘counter environment.’ That is, you set yourself in opposition to the kind of mass tendencies which the media set up. That’s what’s so important about the humanities in the uni­versity...There’s something of a personal dialogue between one human being and another. And the fact that this dialogue is being car­ried out in the teeth of all the mass emotion techniques of the electronic media is a very important side of the humanities.
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"Canadian Energy: Dialogues on Creativity: Northrop Frye." Descant 12, no. 32-3 (1981).

 

Northrop Frye

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Mass democracy, mass morality and the mass media thrive independently of the individual, who joins them only at the cost of at least a partial perversion of his instincts and insights. He pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul – his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.

 

Al Alvarez

 

The weekend began with the expectation that there would be a series of lectures and informative discussions with emphasis on content. It gradually emerged that something more important was actually involved — the awakening of the process of dialogue itself as a free flow of meaning among all the participants. In the beginning, people were expressing fixed positions, which they were tending to defend, but later it became clear that to maintain the feeling of friendship in the group was much more important than to hold any position. Such friendship has an impersonal quality in the sense that its establishment does not depend on a close personal relationship between participants. A new kind of mind thus begins to come into being which is based on the development of a common meaning that is constantly transforming in the process of the dialogue. People are no longer primarily in opposition, nor can they be said to be interacting, rather they are participating in this pool of common meaning which is capable of constant development and change. In this development the group has no pre-established purpose, though at each moment a purpose that is free to change may reveal itself. The group thus begins to engage in a new dynamic relationship in which no speaker is excluded, and in which no particular content is excluded. Thus far we have only begun to explore the possibilities of dialogue in the sense indicated here, but going further along these lines would open up the possibility of transforming not only the relationship between people, but even more, the very nature of consciousness in which these relationships arise.

 

David Bohm

 

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn’t make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting — the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

 

Saul Bellow

 

The mass media are class media.

 

Michael Parenti

 

Today, the Israelis tightened the noose on the mass media in northern occupied Palestine and occupied Palestine. No one can report any news or broadcast any footage. [News reports] are subject to the Israeli censorship which permits and disseminates them. Even you at Al-Jazeera Channel were subjected to arrests, interrogation, restricted activities, and the like. Why do the Israelis resort to concealing the truth on the other side? Why? Do they do that only because they accuse the media outlets of setting the coordinates? This is nonsense. We have the coordinates of these Israeli settlements and military positions in the north, centre, or in any part of occupied Palestine. We do not need anybody to give us information, images, or the like. In that case, they want to conceal the true scene of the war on the other side because it will have definite impact on the Israeli street and media and the morale of the Israelis.

 

Hassan Nasrallah