Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Boyoboy oboyoboy oboyoboyoboyoboyoboyoboy...
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The metropolis today is a classroom; the ads are its teachers. The traditional classroom is an obsolete detention home, a feudal dungeon. (p. 12)
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Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration.
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Acoustic space is totally discontinuous, like touch. It is a sphere without centers or margins.
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Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.
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When Coleridge said that all men are born either Platonists or Aristotelians, he was saying that all men tend to be either acoustic or visual in their sensory bias.
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We are not Argus-eyed, but Argus-eared.
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Current concern with reading and spelling reform steers away from visual to auditory stress. (p. 54)
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Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.
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Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.
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Formal cause, as logos, incorporates the patterns of side-effects as part of essential nature: tetrads restore poesis and the making process to the study of artefacts.
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When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments. (p. 180)
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All of man's artefacts, whether hardware or software, whether bulldozers or laws of chemistry, are alike linguistic in structure and intent. (p. 227)
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We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
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Philosophy was as naive as science in its unconscious acceptance of the assumptions or dynamic of typography. (p. 278)
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History as she is harped. Rite words in rote order. (pp. 108-109)
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The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message. (p. 8)
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Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of communal interdependence. (p. 186)
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The mask, like the side-show freak, is mainly participatory rather than pictorial in its sensory appeal. (p. 352)
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The culture-heroes of preliteracy and postliteracy alike are robots.
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It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV. (p. 53)
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The Homeric hero becomes a split-man as he assumes an individual ego. (p. 58)
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In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin. (p. 47)
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People don't actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath. (p. 184)