Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Each tetrad gives the etymology of its subject, as an uttering or outering of the body physical or mental, and provides its anatomy in fourfold exegetical manner.
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In Chinese, honesty is the figure of a man standing, physically standing, beside his work. That means honesty: a man stands by his work. Two things: figure / ground. (p. 314)
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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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Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.
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The victory over Euclidean space was not achieved by isolated individuals, but by a field of young rebels opposed to all absolutes.
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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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A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters. (p. 245)
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Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.
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All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.
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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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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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Prolonged mimesis of the alphabet and its fragmenting properties produced a new dominant mode of perception and then of culture.
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Every technology contrived and 'outered' by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization. (p. 174)
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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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At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.
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The audience, as ground, shapes and controls the work of art.
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When you move into a new area, a new territory and learn a new language, the language is not a new subject, it is an environment, it is total. (p. 105)
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The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.
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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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The dyslexic: Everyman as cubist.
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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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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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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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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.