Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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It is always the psychic and social grounds, brought into play by each medium or technology, that readjust the balance of the hemispheres and of human sensibilities into equilibrium with those grounds.
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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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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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Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.
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Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.
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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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A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters. (p. 245)
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Youth instinctively understand the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.
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Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.
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Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode – a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.
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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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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 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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Left hemisphere industrialism has blinded the Chinese to the effects of our alphabet: pattern recognition is in the right hemisphere.
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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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Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.
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Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
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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 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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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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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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Scribal culture could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by typography. (p. 149)
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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.