Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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Human perception is literally incarnation.
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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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By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.
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African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film. (p. 44)
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Pornography and obscenity...work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground - situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks.
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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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At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology. (p. 300)
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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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Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
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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 new overkill is simply an extension of our nervous system into a total ecological service environment. Such a service environment can liquidate or terminate its beneficiaries as naturally as it sustains them. (p. 152)
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At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.
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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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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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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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Today, computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. (p. 80)
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At the very high speed of living, everybody needs a new career and a new job and a totally new personality every ten years.
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When we put our central nervous system outside us we returned to the primal nomadic state.
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As the totem pole is tied to the lineality of the missionaries' Bible, so the igloo was made possible by the primus stove.