Marshall McLuhan Quotes
-
The field of 'information theory' began by using the old hardware paradigm of transportation of data from point to point.
-
I've always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened.
-
Our book technology has Gutenberg at one end and the Ford assembly lines at the other. Both are obsolete. (p. 99)
-
Radio comes to us ostensibly with person to person directness that is private and intimate, while in more urgent fact, it is really a subliminal echo chamber of magic power to touch remote and forgotten chords. (p. 302).
-
In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. (p. 125)
-
Non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training. (p. 41)
-
Cartoons drove the photo back to myth and dream screen.
-
The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.
-
The mother tongue is propaganda.
-
The message of radio is one of violent, unified implosion and resonance. (p. 263)
-
Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition. (p. 132)
-
Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village size and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumour, and personal malice. (p. 24)
-
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)
-
Bless advertising art for its pictorial vitality and verbal creativity. (p. 18)
-
When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.
-
Manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication as performance. (p. 96)
-
All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information. (p. 178-179)
-
Without an anti-environment, all environments are invisible. (p. 33)
-
For the oral man the literal text contains all possible levels of meaning. (p. 126)
-
Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.
-
A fixed point of view becomes possible with print and ends the image as a plastic organism. (p. 144)
-
The existential trauma had a physical basis in the first electric extension of our nervous system.
-
Literacy affects the physiology as well as the psychic life of the African. (p. 38)
-
Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.