Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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 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)
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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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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 levelling of inflexion and of wordplay became part of the program of applied knowledge in the seventeenth century. (p. 265)
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Violence is the effort to maintain and restore a weakened psyche. (p. 377)
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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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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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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 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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The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators. (p. 205)
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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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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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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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Language alone includes all the senses in interplay at all times. (p. 253)
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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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The magic of the cave image lies in its being, not in its being seen. The symbolic does not refer. It is. (p. 350)
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All words, in every language, are metaphors.
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Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today.
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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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By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.
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You don't like those ideas? I got others!
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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)