"If there is any experience more than another which conduces to open-mindedness, it is the experience of being bothered by another, of being interrupted by another. ‘We are studying being interrupted.’ Say we do not practise any spiritual discipline. The telephone does it for us. It opens us to the world ‘outside’." [John Cage]

"A coterie of audiophiles strives to produce in their homes an exact copy of original musical performances. Audiophiles maintain that certain recordings contain in their grooves all the information needed to accomplish a miracle of sound technology: the illusion that the listener is there at the live performance of the music. … [Whereas] The case of recorded rock music presents a quite different configuration of language. … The performance that the consumer hears when the recording is playing is not a copy of an original but is a simulacrum, a copy that has no original." [Mark Poster]

Large concerts are designed for people accustomed to video. You get the action captured from many angles - or possibly from pre-recorded material - displayed on large screens.

In TV broadcasts of live concerts, the viewer is presented with a static audio image and a moving visual image. (The saxophone doesn't get louder when the camera gets closer.) This combination is impossible to experience in reality, and is disorientating to those used to attending live concerts. 

"… a wonderful tale related by Charles Hampden-Taylor about a man whose wife’s portrait was being painted by Picasso. One day the man called at the artist’s studio. ‘What do you think?’ asked Picasso, indicating the nearly finished picture. ‘Well …’ said the husband, trying to be polite, ‘it isn’t how she really looks.’ ‘Oh’, said the artist, ‘and how does she really look?’ The husband decided not to be intimidated. ‘Like this!’ said he, producing a photograph from his wallet. Picasso studied the photograph. ‘Mmm …’ he said, ‘small, isn’t she?’ " [Gareth Morgan]

(Compare with Hockney’s brilliant collages of overlapping photos.)

Lionel Trilling notes that it cannot be decided whether man’s belief that he is a ‘Je’ is the result of the Venetian craftsmen’s having learned how to make plate-glass, or whether the demand for looking-glasses stimulated this technological success.

"Until the middle of the century the force, the power, still resided in guns and in weapons. After the middle of the century the real power is in information. Even the atomic bomb is used today not as a weapon but as a message. The fact, the happy fact, that it is not used means that it is not the bomb in itself which works: it is the continuous exchange of messages between powers." [Umberto Eco]

"The establishment of meanings, of what is to be understood, has to remain the business of authority. Tools of expression are provided for those who use them in the same way as spades and picks are handed out to prisoners. The pens and exercise books given to schoolchildren are tools of production, and teaching is programmed to produce only a certain type of acceptable significations. There can be no escape." [Felix Guattari]

"The universe of advertising is entirely one of commodities and consumption. It distils the foreground of technology ideally and thus presents the technical and distinctive side of our age. In this way it has superseded art as the archetypical presentation of what the epoch is about. In advertising, the promise of technology is presented both purely and concretely and hence most attractively. Problems and threats enter only as a background to set off the blessings of technology. Thus we find ourselves archetypically defined in advertisements. They provide a stabilizing and orienting force in the complexity of the still-developing technological society." [Albert Borgmann]

"Where a number of issues are being taken into account in a design decision, inevitably the ones which can be most clearly expressed carry the greatest weight, and are best reflected in the form. Other factors, important too but less well expressed, are not so well reflected. Caught in a net of language of our own invention, we overestimate the language’s impartiality." [Christopher Alexander]

"Cybernetics is an elitist theory. … The ‘law’ of entropy legitimates the just cause of the technocratic domination of language and the bureaucratic reduction of meaning to ‘electronic engineering’." [Mark Poster]

In the Falklands war, the British army was able to prevent TV pictures of combat being screened. (This meant that broadcasters were forced to fill the screens with retired admirals and generals, talking about military strategy. As a result, the public was better informed about strategic issues than in any other modern war.)

In the Gulf war, to prevent coverage of strategic issues (which would have been embarrassing) the US Army made lots of film available of the high-tech weaponry they were using. This film dominated the TV news.