Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Boyoboy oboyoboy oboyoboyoboyoboyoboyoboy...
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Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.
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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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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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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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We are not Argus-eyed, but Argus-eared.
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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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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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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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Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.
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We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
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Current concern with reading and spelling reform steers away from visual to auditory stress. (p. 54)
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The culture-heroes of preliteracy and postliteracy alike are robots.
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History as she is harped. Rite words in rote order. (pp. 108-109)
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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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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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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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Computers can do better than ever what needn’t be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly. (p. 109)
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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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Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
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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 electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message. (p. 8)
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Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.