Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.
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Print, in turning the vernaculars into mass media, or closed systems, created the uniform, centralizing forces of modern nationalism. (p. 226)
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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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Primitivism has become the vulgar cliche of much modern art and speculation. (p. 77)
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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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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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Youth instinctively understand the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.
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To say that a body or its gravitational field 'bends in space' in its vicinity is the discuss visual space in acoustic terms.
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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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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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The Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings. (p. 14)
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Scribal culture could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by typography. (p. 149)
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Literacy, in translating man out of the closed world of tribal depth and resonance, gave man an eye for an ear and ushered him into a visual open world of specialized and divided consciousness.
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I heard what you were saying. You - you know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.
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A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor? (p.7)
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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.
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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 comic strip: upholder of Homeric culture. (p.19)
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Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on. (p. 120)
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Each of our senses makes its own space, but no sense can function in isolation. Only as sight relates the touch, or kinaesthesia, or sound, can the eye see.
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Non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training. (p. 41)
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There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.
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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)