Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy. (p. 154)
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Left hemisphere industrialism has blinded the Chinese to the effects of our alphabet: pattern recognition is in the right hemisphere.
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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)
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The comic strip: upholder of Homeric culture. (p.19)
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Youth instinctively understand the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.
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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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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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America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy - the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the USA.
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The audience, as ground, shapes and controls the work of art.
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Bacon's Adam is a medieval mystic and Milton's a trade union organizer. (p. 214)
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At the very high speed of living, everybody needs a new career and a new job and a totally new personality every ten years.
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Interdeterminacy was a figure-ground problem arising from incongruity between the visual bias of classical science and the new acoustic sensibilities.
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TV is not good at covering single events. It needs a ritual, a rhythm, and a pattern...TV tends to fosters patterns rather than events.
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Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic. (p. 84)
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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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Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
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Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.
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Scribal culture could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by typography. (p. 149)
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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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As Narcissus fell in love with an outering (projection, extension) of himself, man seems invariably to fall in love with the newest gadget or gimmick that is merely an extension of his own body.
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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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Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on. (p. 120)
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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.