Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always preceed causes in the actual developmental order. (p. 303)
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Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.
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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 ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society. (p. 271)
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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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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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We begin again to structure the primordial feelings...from which 3000 years of literacy divorced us. We begin again to live a myth. (p. 17)
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The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos – resonant utterance or word.
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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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New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.
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A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
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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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Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.
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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 mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.
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The sheer increase in the quantity of information movement favoured the visual organization of knowledge and the rise of perspective even before typography. (p. 128)
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The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati.
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One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with.
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The coverage is the war. If there were no coverage, there'd be no war. Yes, the newsmen and the mediamen around the world are actually the fighters, not the soldiers anymore.
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Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space.
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Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
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Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
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Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.