Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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As Narcissus fell in love with an outering (projection, extension) of himself, man seems invariably to fall in love with the newest gadget or gimmick that is merely an extension of his own body.
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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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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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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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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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Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.
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If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.
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A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters. (p. 245)
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The newspaper is a corporate symbolist poem, environmental and invisible, as poem.
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Until more than two centuries after printing nobody discovered how to maintain a single tone or attitude throughout a prose composition. (p. 154)
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The media themselves are the avant-garde of our society. Avant-garde no longer exists in painting, music and poetry, it's the media themselves.
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Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind. (p. 67)
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All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody.
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All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information. (p. 178-179)
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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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It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. (p. 9)
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Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement. (p. 113)
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Manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication as performance. (p. 96)
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Every technology contrived and 'outered' by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization. (p. 174)
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The world of the Greeks illustrates why visual appearances cannot interest people before the interiorization of alphabetic technology. (p. 61)
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Formal logic and the logical syllogism encapsulate connectedness in reasoning.
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Literate man, civilized man, tends to restrict and to separate functions, whereas tribal man has freely extended the form of his body to include the universe. (p. 117)
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The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the ground rules of the environment. The ground rules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serves as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. (p. 93)