Elemental Media Quotes

“The crossroads of humans and things defines the domain of media studies. We are conditioned by conditions we condition. We, the created creators, shape tools that shape us. We live by our crafts and conditions. It is hard to look them in the face.”
― John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media

“Media are not just pipes or channels. Media theory has something both ecological and existential to say. Media are more than the audiovisual and print institutions that strive to fill our empty seconds with programming and advertising stimulus; they are our condition, our fate, and our challenge. Without means there is no life. We are mediated by our bodies; by our dependence on oxygen; by the ancient history of life written into each of our cells; by upright posture, sexual pair bonding, and the domestication of plants and animals; by calendar-making and astronomy; by the printing press, the green revolution, and the Internet. We are not only surrounded by the history-rich artifacts of applied intelligence; we also are such artifacts. Culture is part of our natural history.”
― John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media

“Media show up wherever we humans face the unamangeable mortality of our material existence: the melancholy facts that memory cannot hold up and body cannot last, that time is, at base, the merciless and generous habitat for humans and things. Media lift us out of time by providing a symbolic world that can store and process data, in the widest sense of that word.”
― John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media