Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin. (p. 47)
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The Homeric hero becomes a split-man as he assumes an individual ego. (p. 58)
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People don't actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath. (p. 184)
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It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education & entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter.
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A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
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The electronic age is a world in which causes and effects become almost interchangeable, as in music structures. (p. 99)
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In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.
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The ways of thinking implanted by electronic culture are very different from those fostered by print culture. Since the Renaissance most methods and procedures have strongly tended towards stress on the visual organization of knowledge.
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The coverage is the war. If there were no coverage, there'd be no war. Yes, the newsmen and the mediamen around the world are actually the fighters, not the soldiers anymore.
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The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived with the figure minus ground.
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I am a pattern watcher. (p. 311)
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Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.
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Only puny secrets need protection. Big secrets are protected by public incredulity. You can actually dissipate a situation by giving it maximal coverage. As to alarming people, that's done by rumours, not by coverage. (p. 92)
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Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts.
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For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
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Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.
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Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always preceed causes in the actual developmental order. (p. 303)
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World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation. (p.66)
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The unique innovation of the phonetic alphabet released the Greeks from the universal acoustic spill of tribal societies. (p. 70)
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Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perception...When these ratios change, men change.
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Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness.
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While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.
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The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.
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The book is a private confessional form that provides a 'point of view.'