Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.
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Every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience. (p. 171)
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The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures.
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The pre-atomist multisensory void was an animate, pulsating, and moving vibrant interval, neither container nor contained, acoustic space penetrated by tactility.
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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 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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Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. We lose 'touch' without it. Visual space is the space of detachment.
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Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog. (p. 48)
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African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film. (p. 44)
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Unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitutes a total and near-instanteous transformation of culture, values and attitudes.
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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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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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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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My method is vertical rather than horizontal so the scenery does not change but the texture does.
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The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators. (p. 205)
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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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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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Affluence creates poverty.
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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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Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic. (p. 84)
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A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space. (p. 73)