Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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.
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Although meaningless in a tribal context, numbers and statistics assume mythic and magical qualities of infallibility in literate societies. (p. 114)
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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 '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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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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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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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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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 new science of communication is percept, not concept. (p. 259)
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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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Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.
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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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Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology. (p. 245)
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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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The book is a private confessional form that provides a 'point of view.'
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Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.
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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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The laws of the media, in tetrad form, bring logos and formal cause up to date to reveal analytically the structure of all human artefacts.
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The media have substituted themselves for the older world.
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The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
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The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it’s the universal experience of TV watchers.
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Language is a form of organized stutter.
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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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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.