Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Bacon's Adam is a medieval mystic and Milton's a trade union organizer. (p. 214)
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African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film. (p. 44)
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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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My method is vertical rather than horizontal so the scenery does not change but the texture does.
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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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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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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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When we put our central nervous system outside us we returned to the primal nomadic state.
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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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Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation. (p. 362)
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Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today.
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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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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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Typography as the first mechanization of a handicraft is itself the perfect instance not of a new knowledge, but of applied knowledge. (p. 171)
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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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Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. We lose 'touch' without it. Visual space is the space of detachment.
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Affluence creates poverty.
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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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We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation. (xx)
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A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space. (p. 73)
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Violence is the effort to maintain and restore a weakened psyche. (p. 377)
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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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The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication...is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts.
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Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic. (p. 84)