Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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People never remember but the computer never forgets. (p. 69)
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The anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic history in King Lear. (p. 18)
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The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.
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One of the things that happens at the speed of light is that people lose their goals in life. So what takes the place of goals and objectives? Well, role-playing is coming in very fast.
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The hot radio medium used in cool or nonliterate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment. (p. 30)
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A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space. (p. 73)
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The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.
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The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb. (p. 55)
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Marx shared with economists then and since the inability to make his concepts include innovational processes. It is one thing to spot a new product but quite another to observe the invisible new environments generated by the action of the product on a variety of pre-existing social grounds. (p. 63)
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All words at every level of prose and poetry and all devices of language and speech derive their meaning from figure / ground relation.
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By involving all men in all men, by the electric extension of their own nervous systems, the new technology turns the figure of the primitive society into a universal ground that buries all previous figures. (p. 25)
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We are swiftly moving at present from an era where business was our culture into an era when culture will be our business. Between these poles stand the huge and ambiguous entertainment industries. (p. 384)
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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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The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture. (p. 168)
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When we put our central nervous system outside us we returned to the primal nomadic state.
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Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.
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Try not to have Emily exposed to hours and hours of TV. It is a vile drug which permeates the nervous system, especially in the young.
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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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Cultural dominance by either the left or the right hemisphere is largely dependent upon environmental factors.
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Human perception is literally incarnation.
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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 manuscript shaped medieval literary conventions at all levels. (p. 99)
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Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class. (p. 136)
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When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.