Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.
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At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology. (p. 300)
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The increase of visual stress among the Greeks alienated them from the primitive art that the electronic age now reinvents after interiorizing the 'unified field' of electric all-at-onceness. (p. 72)
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The portability of the book, like that of the easel-painting, added much to the new culture of individualism. (p. 233)
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Cervantes confronted typographic man in the figure of Don Quixote. (p. 242)
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The Greeks invented both their artistic and scientific novelties after the interiorization of the alphabet. (p. 66)
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Cultural dominance by either the left or the right hemisphere is largely dependent upon environmental factors.
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Bless Madison Ave for restoring the magical art of the cavemen to suburbia. (p. 130)
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America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy - the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the USA.
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People never remember but the computer never forgets. (p. 69)
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In tetrad form, the artefact is seen to be not netural or passive, but an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground.
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The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
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Bacon's Adam is a medieval mystic and Milton's a trade union organizer. (p. 214)
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The telegraph press mosaic is acoustic space as much as an electric circus.
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Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.
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The potential of any new technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors. (p. 210)
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Print altered not only the spelling and grammar but the accentuation and inflection of languages, and made 'bad grammar' possible. (p. 263)
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Environments work us over and remake us. It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things. (p. 90)
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Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
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Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension.
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Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of 'what the public wants' played over its own nerves. (p. 68)
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The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.
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All media of communications are cliches serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns of associations and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness.
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Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society.