Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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The young are really the heirs to a generation of incompetence.
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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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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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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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With TV, came the icon, the inclusive image, the inclusive political posture or stance. (p. 191)
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In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.
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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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The medieval student had to be paleographer, editor, and publisher of the authors he read. (p. 109)
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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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The field of 'information theory' began by using the old hardware paradigm of transportation of data from point to point.
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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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Left hemisphere industrialism has blinded the Chinese to the effects of our alphabet: pattern recognition is in the right hemisphere.
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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 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 dyslexic: Everyman as cubist.
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The most human thing about us is our technology.
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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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Youth instinctively understand the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.
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Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space...it is a cosmic, invisible architecture of the human dark. (p. 13)
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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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Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode – a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.
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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 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)