"People without an internalized symbolic system can all too easily become captives of the media. They are easily manipulated by demagogues, pacified by entertainers, and exploited by anyone who has something to sell. If we have become dependent on television, on drugs, and on facile calls to political or religious salvation, it is because we have so little to fall back on, so few rules to keep our mind from being taken over by those who claim to have the answers. Without the capacity to provide its own information, the mind drifts into randomness. It is within each person’s power to decide whether its order will be restored from the outside, in ways over which we have no control, or whether the order wil be the result of an internal pattern that grows organically from our skills and knowledge(1)."

"Most jobs and many leisure activities–especially those involving the passive consumption of mass media–are not designed to make us happy and strong. Their pupose is to make money for someone else. If we allow them to, they can suck out the, marrow of out lives, leaving only feeble husks(3)."

"…Unfortunately, we often merely compound our error by trying harder, or by plastering over our old faulty system with a new faulty system. It's seductive, for example, to give ourselves over to some false authority or guru who will run our lives for us as we attempt to find something or someone outside of ourselves to take care of our being(41)."

"Not only are famous people available to us on television, in the movies, in autobiographies, and in celebrity magazines, but often these media furnish intimate details about their private lives. We may know more about Merv. Oprah, Johnny, and Phil than we do about our neighbors. At one point, according to a national survey, newsman Walter Cronkite was the ‘most trusted man in America(69).’"

"Household cleaning routines are only one area in which we’ve abandoned our freedom of choice to the strategies of marketing gurus. Few areas of our lives are untouched by products that are designed for the sole purpose of getting us to feel insecure enough to part with our money(46)."

"Over the last decade, the number of companies controlling the vast bulk of American newsprint shrunk from twenty to eleven. Which is bad enough, but in Australia, the major press oweners are basically three. An American citizen, Rupert Murdoch, controls 70 percent of Australian newsprint(69)."

McKenzie Wark, "Virtual Geography: living with global media events"