Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV. (p. 53)
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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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The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.
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The culture-heroes of preliteracy and postliteracy alike are robots.
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The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message. (p. 8)
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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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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.
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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.
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Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
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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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Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information.
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A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
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Languages are environments to which the child related synesthetically. (p. 166)
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One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information system. (p. 298)
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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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Rabelais offers a vision of the future of print culture as a consumer's paradise of applied knowledge. (p. 167)
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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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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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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 'natural magic' of the camera obscura anticipated Hollywood in turning the spectacle of the external world into a consumer commodity or package. (p. 146)
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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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Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always preceed causes in the actual developmental order. (p. 303)
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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)