Advertising agencies have always been mystified as to: why is the storyboard more effective than the final product? And the answer to that is very important. It is that the incomplete form allows the audience more participation than the completed form.

“Idol” is just another word for “star” or “celebrity”—and “celebrity” is the new type of “personality” that was, as Walter Benjamin noted back in the 1930s, created in the new media. And once this new personality is no longer just an exception, but the norm, once we all learn how to build a sense of self in the mode of idols, we can give it a different name: The Profile.

When you live in an Information Age culture becomes big business, education becomes big business, and the cultural explosion, or the information explosion, becomes itself culture. It knocks down all the walls between culture and business—as between education and business.

Continuing on his observation that the modern age has jokes without the story line In the electric age you don’t have a continuity in the old sense. You don’t have a strung-out continuum. You…, everything happens at once. Everything goes over everything else, and so everything is affecting everything else. There are many examples of this—and it helps to bring to mind that every joke really reveals a grievance.

I do believe he is a popularizer. I do believe in five years we will look back at this book and perhaps shrug our shoulders. I don't think it's a long or lasting influence.

In the old days, before film and radio, in the age of authenticity, people read novels and witnessed how the protagonists shaped their personalities—how they became unique and autonomous individuals. This genre was called Bildungsroman: a novel (Roman) depicting the building (Bildung) of an authentic self. Readers learned from these media how to build themselves in the same way.

When watching, and participating in an Idol show, we also see how a personality is built: At the outset, all competitors are unknown, average people. They have a very low profile. At the end, at least the winners have become high-profile idols. The essence of the show is not simply to depict, but, much more intensely, as true reality TV, to actually be the life path by which a person becomes who they are.

The old Bildungsroman, was a fantasy about self-building, whereas Idol is the real—or better— wink, wink—hyperreal deal.

"Idols" is the archetype of the reality of second-order observation that is the reality of the media that is the reality of profilicity.

Fai tells me that in currently popular Korean graphic novels, or comics, the protagonists are portrayed as being watched by a sort of god-like audience, as if they were live-streaming. The protagonists interact with this general peer, for instance by earning money or getting rewards.

A great error is the dismissal of “profilicity” as pathological—as a morally deficient “narcissism” of inauthentic people obsessed with themselves. But: Profilicity is no more narcissist per se as authenticity or sincerity. Of course, in profilicity, we seek validation by presenting ourselves nicely to the general peer. But: Why is this more “narcissist” than seeking validation from sincere or authentic peers? When shaping and presenting ourselves, we’ve always been concerned with our image—we just used different technologies for making that mirror where we saw our image reflected

Information at electric speed blows out all the partitions between jobs, involves people in firms, in operations that are total and inclusive, so that… Big business has discovered that instead of a person occupying a little specialist slot in the business he it’s better to be worked with small teams that can take overall cognizance and consideration of the whole operation of the firm, and come up with all sorts of new solutions for factors that affect the entire operation firm, instead of just going ahead doing their little job in the old pattern.

The medium does things to people and they're always completely unaware of. [...] They don't really notice the new medium that is roughing them up, they think of the old medium, because the old medium is almost the content of the new medium, as movies are tend to be the content of TV, and as books used to be the content, novels used to be the content of movies, and so every time a new medium arrives the old medium is the content.

The electronic environment makes an information level outside the school room that is far higher than the information level inside the school room. In the 19th century the knowledge inside the school room was higher than the knowledge outside. Today it is reversed; the child knows that in going to school he is in a sense interrupting his education.

People didn’t live in private spaces in earlier periods and it was of the coming of the book and the need for areas—private areas, in which to be eaten, study, and so on—that privacy gradually caught on as a value.

In the new electric world where everybody is involved in everybody—where everybody is involved in complex processes that are going on in the total environment—the old identity cards that used to constitute private identity—the old means of finding out who am I—will not work.

[...] People now have to encounter themselves in the inner world—Kierkegaard- or existential style—in order to know who they are. The old methods of merely external identity by marks of occupation, national origin, age grouping, and so on, these will not serve any longer as means of distinguishing private identity.

The Fellini’s and Bergmans, and such, pull the story line off the film. And the result is that you become much more profoundly involved in the film process.

Same way with private lives; what had formerly been private life tends to become more and more corporate.

The whole world of teenage dress is a world of icon in one hand in the sense that they stress all sorts of images with strongly marked bounding lines. But these images, the costumes that they prefer, the ones that highlight role-playing. rather than individual identity—they would rather be involved.

[...] Well for example: a judge with a wig. It doesn’t represent any private entity whatever—he is a role, a function in the whole society. The surgeon in his white coat, the scientist in the white coat—this is role playing. And this appeals deeply to the young and the teenager type. The wearing the long hair, the beards, and so on, this suggests involvement in depth——in role. And it’s not a private identity so much, as a corporate one.

Television is directing our energies inward. Our children today are growing up as a kind of yogi zen Buddhist bunch of inward directed people looking seriously into themselves. Not just idly selecting some exterior goal but seeking for some completely meaningful identification with some great process. That’s why youth Peace Corps, and so on, appeals to children. It’s not a job, it’s a completely involving role.

And so, the television, I would say, has had this extraordinary effect of driving Western man inward. Western man has triumphed over nature because he’s been oriented outward—at the visible world. And now with television he is being oriented inward to the invisible world.

LSD is merely one little side issue in TV effects.

We are reentering the old tribal world, but this time we're going to go through the tribal downs on the tribal dream wide awake the search for involvement.