Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Dantzig explains why the language of number had to be increased to meet the needs created by the new technology of letters. (p. 200)
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Formal logic and the logical syllogism encapsulate connectedness in reasoning.
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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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One touch of nature makes the whole world tin.
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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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A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters. (p. 245)
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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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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)
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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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The world of the Greeks illustrates why visual appearances cannot interest people before the interiorization of alphabetic technology. (p. 61)
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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)
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Every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience. (p. 171)
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When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.
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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 dyslexic: Everyman as cubist.
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All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.
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The automated presidential surrogate is the superlative nobody. (p. 157)
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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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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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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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The newspaper is a corporate symbolist poem, environmental and invisible, as poem.
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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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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.