Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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Each tetrad gives the etymology of its subject, as an uttering or outering of the body physical or mental, and provides its anatomy in fourfold exegetical manner.
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The percept takes priority of the concept.
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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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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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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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Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.
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Print, in turning the vernaculars into mass media, or closed systems, created the uniform, centralizing forces of modern nationalism. (p. 226)
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The manuscript shaped medieval literary conventions at all levels. (p. 99)
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African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film. (p. 44)
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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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There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening. A chapter sub-heading attributed by McLuhan to Alfred North Whitehead
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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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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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Bless Madison Ave for restoring the magical art of the cavemen to suburbia. (p. 130)
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Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. We lose 'touch' without it. Visual space is the space of detachment.
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With TV, came the icon, the inclusive image, the inclusive political posture or stance. (p. 191)
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We have become like the most primitive Palaeolithic man, once more global wanderers, but information gatherers rather than food gatherers. From now on the source of food, wealth and life itself will be information.
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By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.
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When you move into a new area, a new territory and learn a new language, the language is not a new subject, it is an environment, it is total. (p. 105)
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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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I don't explain-I explore.
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War has become the environment of our time if only because it is an accelerated form of innovation and education. (p. 381)
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The Greek 'point of view' in both art and chronology has little in common with ours but was much like that of the Middle Ages. (p. 64)