Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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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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At the very high speed of living, everybody needs a new career and a new job and a totally new personality every ten years.
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The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication...is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts.
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Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.
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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)
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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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Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation. (p. 362)
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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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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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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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Prolonged mimesis of the alphabet and its fragmenting properties produced a new dominant mode of perception and then of culture.
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At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology. (p. 300)
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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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The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. (p. 122)
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With Francis Bacon, Vico continuously asserts the claims of grammar as true science precisely because it has not yielded to specialism and method.
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Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status. (p. 133)
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Bacon's Adam is a medieval mystic and Milton's a trade union organizer. (p. 214)
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There are no connections in resonant space. There are only interfaces and metamorphoses. (p. 75)
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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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Scribal culture could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by typography. (p. 149)
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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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Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.
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If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.