Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.
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Every process pushed far enough tends to reverse or flip suddenly. Chiasmus – the reversal to process caused by increasing its speed, scope or size. (p. 6)
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Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity. (p. 183)
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Since Sputnik, the earth has been wrapped in a dome-like blanket or bubble. Nature ended.
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Q: Why is America the land of the overrated child and the underrated adult? Q: How can children grow up in a world in which adults idolize youthfulness? Q: What happens when the ad makers taker over all the popular myths and poetry? (p. 141)
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Interface, of the resonant interval as 'where the action is', whether chemical, psychic or social, involves touch.
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The only cool PR is provided by one's enemies. They toil incessantly and for free. (88)
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By simply moving information and brushing information against information, any medium whatever creates vast wealth.
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We live invested in an electric information environment that is quite as imperceptible to us as water is to fish. (p. 5)
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Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses.
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Each new technology is a reprogramming of sensory life. (p. 33)
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Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.
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The artists of our culture, 'the antennae of the race,' had tuned in to the new ground and begun exploring discontinuity and simultaneity.
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Native societies did not think of themselves as being in the world as occupants but considered that their rituals created the world and keep it operational.
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To the blind all things are sudden. (p. 41)
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The role of the artist is to create an Anti-environment as a means of perception and adjustment. (p. 31)
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Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.
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The Chinese used the intervals between things as the primary means of getting 'in touch' with situations.
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The celebrated earthy tactility of Rabelais is a massive backwash of receding manuscript culture. (p. 170)
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Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.
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The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.
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The invention of typography confirmed and extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly repeatable 'commodity,' the first assembly-line, and the first mass-production. (p. 142)
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Chinese script is not visual but iconic and tactile. It does not disturb the tribal bonds. (p. 72)
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At the speed of light there is no sequence; everything happens at the same instant.