Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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I don't explain-I explore.
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The portability of the book, like that of the easel-painting, added much to the new culture of individualism. (p. 233)
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Print altered not only the spelling and grammar but the accentuation and inflection of languages, and made 'bad grammar' possible. (p. 263)
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Marlowe anticipated Whitman's barbaric yawp by setting up a national PA system of blank verse – a rising iambic system of sound to suit the new success story. (p. 223)
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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 uniformity and repeatability of print created the 'political arithmetic' of the seventeenth century and the 'hedonistic calculus' of the eighteenth. (p. 237)
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Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.
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Tactility is the space of the interval; acoustic space is spherical and resonant.
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Primitivism has become the vulgar cliche of much modern art and speculation. (p. 77)
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African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film. (p. 44)
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The Gutenberg galaxy was theoretically dissolved in 1905 with the discovery of curved space, but in practice it had been invaded by the telegraph two generations before that. (p. 286)
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The comic strip: upholder of Homeric culture. (p.19)
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Bless Madison Ave for restoring the magical art of the cavemen to suburbia. (p. 130)
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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 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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As the totem pole is tied to the lineality of the missionaries' Bible, so the igloo was made possible by the primus stove.
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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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Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society.
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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)
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Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.
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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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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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In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.
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The press is a group confessional form that provides communal participation. The book is a private confessional form that provides a 'point of view.' (p. 204)