Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.
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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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In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. (p. 125)
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All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.
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The Greeks encountered the confusion of tongues when numbers invaded Euclidean space. (p. 203)
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Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.
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Typography extended its character to the regulation and fixation of languages. (p. 229)
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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 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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Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.
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A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor? (p.7)
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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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The most human thing about us is our technology.
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Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status. (p. 133)
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World War I a railway war of centralization and encirclement. World War II a radio war of decentralization concluded by the Bomb. World War III a TV guerrilla war with no divisions between civil and military fronts. (p. 152)
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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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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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By electricity we have not been driven out of our senses so much as our senses have been driven out of us. (p. 375)
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New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers. (p. 47)
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The automated presidential surrogate is the superlative nobody. (p. 157)
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Every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience. (p. 171)
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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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One touch of nature makes the whole world tin.
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The reduction of the tactile qualities of life and language constitute the refinement sought in the Renaissance and repudiated now in the electronic age. (p. 272)