Marshall McLuhan Quotes
-
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.
-
The user is the content of any situation, whether its driving a car, or wearing clothes or watching a show. The user is content.
-
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)
-
Languages are environments to which the child related synesthetically. (p. 166)
-
Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information.
-
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.
-
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)
-
Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.
-
Language is a form of organized stutter.
-
Rabelais offers a vision of the future of print culture as a consumer's paradise of applied knowledge. (p. 167)
-
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)
-
Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology. (p. 245)
-
Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.
-
The media have substituted themselves for the older world.
-
The new science of communication is percept, not concept. (p. 259)
-
Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society. (p. 271)
-
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)
-
We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
-
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)
-
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.
-
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.
-
Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology. (p. 85)
-
The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it’s the universal experience of TV watchers.
-
The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.