Marshall McLuhan Quotes
-
Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.
-
Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.
-
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.
-
Typography extended its character to the regulation and fixation of languages. (p. 229)
-
By electricity we have not been driven out of our senses so much as our senses have been driven out of us. (p. 375)
-
The victory over Euclidean space was not achieved by isolated individuals, but by a field of young rebels opposed to all absolutes.
-
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)
-
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.
-
Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status. (p. 133)
-
The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of culture, as Harold Innis was the first to show. (p. 56)
-
Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.
-
A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor? (p.7)
-
All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.
-
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.
-
Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.
-
It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. (p. 9)
-
Prolonged mimesis of the alphabet and its fragmenting properties produced a new dominant mode of perception and then of culture.
-
With Francis Bacon, Vico continuously asserts the claims of grammar as true science precisely because it has not yielded to specialism and method.
-
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)
-
In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.
-
New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers. (p. 47)
-
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.
-
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)
-
All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information. (p. 178-179)