Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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Gutenberg made all history available as classified data: the transportable book brought the world of the dead into the space of the gentlemen's library; the telegraph brought the entire world of the living to the workman's breakfast table. (p. 15)
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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 user is the content of any situation, whether its driving a car, or wearing clothes or watching a show. The user is content.
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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 new science of communication is percept, not concept. (p. 259)
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Older cliches are retrieved both as inherent principles that inform the new ground and new awareness, and as archetypal nostalgia figures with transformed meaning in relation to the new ground.
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The book is a private confessional form that provides a 'point of view.'
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Languages are environments to which the child related synesthetically. (p. 166)
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The 'tragic flaw' is not a detail of characterization, a mere 'fly in the ointment', but a structural feature of ordinary consciousness. (p.45)
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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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Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information.
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The method of the twentieth century is to use not single but multiple models for experimental exploration – the technique of the suspended judgement. (p. 81)
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Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.
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Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology. (p. 245)
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Language is a form of organized stutter.
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By involving all men in all men, by the electric extension of their own nervous systems, the new technology turns the figure of the primitive society into a universal ground that buries all previous figures. (p. 25)
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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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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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Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.
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Paradox is the technique for seizing the conflicting aspects of any problem. Paradox coalesces or telescopes various facets of a complex process in a single instant. (p. 106)
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A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion.
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Nobody can doubt that the entire range of applied science contributes to the very format of a newspaper. But the headline is a feature which began with the Napoleonic Wars. The headline is a primitive shout of rage, triumph, fear, or warning, and newspapers have thrived on wars ever since.
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The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.