Marshall McLuhan Quotes
In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner. (p. 4)
Quotes to Explore
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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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Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.
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Each new technology is a reprogramming of sensory life. (p. 33)
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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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Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. (p.46)
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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)