Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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Privacy invasion is now one of biggest knowledge industries. (p. 24)
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Typography extended its character to the regulation and fixations of languages. (p. 260)
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The user of the electric light - or a hammer, or a language, or a book - is the content. As such, there is a total metamorphosis of the user by the interface. It is the metamorphosis that I consider the message.
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Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been...destroyed by sudden environmental change.
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Man in the electronic age has no possible environment except the globe and no possible occupation except information-gathering.
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Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.
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Sheer visual quantity evokes the magical resonance of the tribal hoard. The box office looms as a return to the echo chamber of bardic incantation. (p. 288)
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Color is not so much a visual as a tactile medium.
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My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.
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War is never anything less than accelerated technological change. (p. 102)
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By surpassing writing, we have regained our wholeness, not on a national or cultural but cosmic plane.
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After childhood, the senses specialize via the channels of dominant technologies and social weaponries.
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For me any of the little gestures I make are all tentative probes. That's why I feel free to make them sound as outrageous or extreme as possible. Until you make it extreme, the probe is not very efficient.
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Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.
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The city no longer exists except as a cultural ghost for tourists. Any highway eatery with its TV set, newspaper and magazine is as cosmopolitan as New York or Paris. (p.12)
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We are not Argus-eyed, but Argus-eared.
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The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action.
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Acoustic space is totally discontinuous, like touch. It is a sphere without centers or margins.
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The metropolis today is a classroom; the ads are its teachers. The traditional classroom is an obsolete detention home, a feudal dungeon. (p. 12)
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When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments. (p. 180)
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I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.
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Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.
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The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds.