Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.
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We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
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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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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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Languages are environments to which the child related synesthetically. (p. 166)
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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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Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information.
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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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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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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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Q: Do you feel a need to be distinctive and mass-produced? Q: Are you in the groove? That is, are you moving in ever-diminishing circles? Q: How often do you change your mind, your politics, your clothes? (p. 121-125)
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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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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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Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perception...When these ratios change, men change.
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The culture-heroes of preliteracy and postliteracy alike are robots.
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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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Language is a form of organized stutter.
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The literate man is a sucker for propaganda...You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas.
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Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
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The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message. (p. 8)
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I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
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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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The twentieth century encounter between alphabetic and electronic forces of culture confers on the printed word a crucial role in staying the return to 'the Africa within.' (p. 51)