Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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The telegraph press mosaic is acoustic space as much as an electric circus.
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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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The levelling of inflexion and of wordplay became part of the program of applied knowledge in the seventeenth century. (p. 265)
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Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world. (p. 30)
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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 Greeks invented both their artistic and scientific novelties after the interiorization of the alphabet. (p. 66)
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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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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 nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images. (p. 360)
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The 'interface' of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism – a formula for blitz and metamorphosis. (p. 161)
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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 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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Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure but metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing in terms of another. (p. 298)
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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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Aretino, like Rabelais and Cervantes, proclaimed the meaning of Typography as Gargantuan, Fantastic, Supra-human. (p. 220)
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You don't like those ideas? I got others!
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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.
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The hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light.
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People in new environments always produce the new preceptual modality without any difficulty or awareness of change. It is later that the psychic and social realignments baffle societies.
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The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer.
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Unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitutes a total and near-instanteous transformation of culture, values and attitudes.
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Newton, and 'proper scientific method' after him, conducted attention to 'continuous description' of experimental phenomena instead of to causes.
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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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Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.