Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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 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)
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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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Newton, and 'proper scientific method' after him, conducted attention to 'continuous description' of experimental phenomena instead of to causes.
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A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various externalizations of our senses. (p. 49)
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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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New media are new languages, their grammar and syntax yet unknown.
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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 nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images. (p. 360)
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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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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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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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Every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience. (p. 171)
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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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It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.
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Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic. (p. 84)
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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 discarnate TV user lives in a world between fantasy and dream, and is in a typically hypnotic state, which is the ultimate form and level of participation.
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The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity. (p. 135)
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African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film. (p. 44)
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Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.
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The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.
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Human perception is literally incarnation.
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The images of mankind have become the most basic thing about them. And they're all software, and disembodied. (p. 346)