Marshall McLuhan Quotes
-
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.
-
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
-
Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.
-
Computers can do better than ever what needn’t be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly. (p. 109)
-
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.
-
A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
-
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.
-
In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.
-
Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always preceed causes in the actual developmental order. (p. 303)
-
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.
-
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)
-
I am not a 'culture critic' because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world.
-
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.
-
Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perception...When these ratios change, men change.
-
I am a pattern watcher. (p. 311)
-
The unique innovation of the phonetic alphabet released the Greeks from the universal acoustic spill of tribal societies. (p. 70)
-
The electronic age is a world in which causes and effects become almost interchangeable, as in music structures. (p. 99)
-
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.
-
The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.
-
Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information.
-
World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation. (p.66)
-
Language is a form of organized stutter.
-
Rabelais offers a vision of the future of print culture as a consumer's paradise of applied knowledge. (p. 167)
-
We now live in a technologically prepared environment that blankets the earth itself. The humanly contrived environment of electric information and power has begun to take precedence over the old environment of 'nature.' Nature, as it were, begins to be the content of our technology.