Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology. (p. 245)
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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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Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology. (p. 85)
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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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Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always preceed causes in the actual developmental order. (p. 303)
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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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Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.
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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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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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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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The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos – resonant utterance or word.
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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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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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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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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 bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati.
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The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.
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A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
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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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Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.
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New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.
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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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Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space.