Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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The comic strip: upholder of Homeric culture. (p.19)
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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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Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.
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Bacon's Adam is a medieval mystic and Milton's a trade union organizer. (p. 214)
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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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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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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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The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators. (p. 205)
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The young are really the heirs to a generation of incompetence.
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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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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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Visual space is the space of detachment. Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. (p. 194)
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The audience, as ground, shapes and controls the work of art.
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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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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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Youth instinctively understand the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.
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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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Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode – a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.
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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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Left hemisphere industrialism has blinded the Chinese to the effects of our alphabet: pattern recognition is in the right hemisphere.
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You don't like those ideas? I got others!
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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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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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Scribal culture could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by typography. (p. 149)