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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Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation. (p.66)
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The culture-heroes of preliteracy and postliteracy alike are robots.
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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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Language is a form of organized stutter.
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Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
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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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The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message. (p. 8)
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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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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)
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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.