Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.
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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 field of 'information theory' began by using the old hardware paradigm of transportation of data from point to point.
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Primitivism has become the vulgar cliche of much modern art and speculation. (p. 77)
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When you move into a new area, a new territory and learn a new language, the language is not a new subject, it is an environment, it is total. (p. 105)
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Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode – a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.
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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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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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Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
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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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The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.
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Scribal culture could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by typography. (p. 149)
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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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There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.
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A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor? (p.7)
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In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud. (p. 94)
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Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.
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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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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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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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Interdeterminacy was a figure-ground problem arising from incongruity between the visual bias of classical science and the new acoustic sensibilities.
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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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Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.
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Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.