Marshall McLuhan Quotes
-
The electronic age is a world in which causes and effects become almost interchangeable, as in music structures. (p. 99)
-
Computers can do better than ever what needn’t be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly. (p. 109)
-
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.
-
The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message. (p. 8)
-
Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.
-
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.
-
It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV. (p. 53)
-
A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
-
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.
-
People don't actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath. (p. 184)
-
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.
-
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.
-
In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.
-
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)
-
The Homeric hero becomes a split-man as he assumes an individual ego. (p. 58)
-
For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
-
World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation. (p.66)
-
Although meaningless in a tribal context, numbers and statistics assume mythic and magical qualities of infallibility in literate societies. (p. 114)
-
Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.
-
The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.
-
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.
-
We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
-
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.