Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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The young are really the heirs to a generation of incompetence.
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Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.
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Youth instinctively understand the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.
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Manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication as performance. (p. 96)
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In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.
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The meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience. The content of new situations, both private and corporate, is typically the preceding situation.
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A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various externalizations of our senses. (p. 49)
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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 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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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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A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters. (p. 245)
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Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.
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The comic strip: upholder of Homeric culture. (p.19)
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Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.
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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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Visual space is the space of detachment. Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. (p. 194)
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Poetry and the arts can’t exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind.
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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 dyslexic: Everyman as cubist.
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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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All of the new media have enriched our perceptions of language and older media. They are to the man-made environment what species are to biology. (p. 84)
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Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
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The public has yet to see TV as TV. Broadcasters have no awareness of its potential. The movie people are just beginning to get a grasp on film.
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Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.