Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive. (p. 201)
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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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In this book we turn to the study of new patterns of energy arising from man’s physical and psychic artifacts and social organizations. The only method for perceiving process and pattern is by inventory of effects obtained by the comparison and contrast of developing situations. (p. 8)
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The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature...The new media are not ways of relating us to the old world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.
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The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer.
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Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies. (p. 86)
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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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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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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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Money is a poor man's credit card.
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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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African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film. (p. 44)
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The nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images. (p. 360)
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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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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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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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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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The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography. The printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, created extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly. (p. 23)
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Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.
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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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When we put our central nervous system outside us we returned to the primal nomadic state.
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I don't explain-I explore.
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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)