« ... if people turn to telematic technology to use it for conversation, rather than to be distracted by it, then technical images suddenly change character. Suddenly they become surfaces where information is produced and through which people can enter into dialogue. They suddenly play the meditating role that linear texts once played between correspondents: they become letters, except that images can carry infinitely more information than texts. For surfaces consist of infinitely many lines. The art of letter writing is almost lost. Images that can be telematically manipulated could give rise to an art that is still inconceivable, a pictorial dialogue infinitely richer than linear, historical dialogue could ever have been.
Such a society, in dialogue through images, would be a society of artists. It would dialogically envision, in images, situations that have never been seen and could not be predicted. It would be a society of players who would constantly generate new relationships by playing off moves against countermoves, a society of Homines ludentes in which inconceivable possibilities would open to human existence. But that is not all. As a result of this creative play and counterplay, a consensus would arise, allowing society to program the apparatuses by means of images. Apparatuses would then serve this broadly human intention, which is to say, to release people from work and free them for play with other people in a way that constantly generates new information and new adventures. I believe this is the utopia that engages the unspectacular revolutionaries.
After this digression, another look at the possibilities that lie dormant in telematic equipment, at the silly twiddling with telematic gadgets, shows where most cultural critics go wrong. They try to criticize the radiating centers to change or do away with them. But revolutionary engagement has to begin not with the centers but with the silly telematic gadgets. It is these that must be changed and changed in ways that suit their technology. ...»
Vilem Flusser, INTO THE UNIVERSE OF TECHNICAL IMAGES, pp85-86, University of Minnesota Press, 2011 (originally, Ins Universum der technischen Bilder, 1985)