Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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 manuscript shaped medieval literary conventions at all levels. (p. 99)
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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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A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
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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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Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.
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When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized. (p. 47)
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Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.
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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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Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.
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Print created national uniformity and government centralism, but also individualism and opposition to government as such. (p. 267)
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The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie.
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New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.
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We are numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture. (p. 16)
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In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner. (p. 4)
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The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati.
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The stock market was created by the telegraph and the telephone, and its panics are engineered by carefully orchestrated stories in the press. (p. 106)
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As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.
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Art is anything you can get away with.
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The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
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The print-made split between head and heart is the trauma which affects Europe from Machiavelli till the present. (p. 193)
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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 typographic lore of school children points to the gap between the scribal and typographic man. (p. 103)
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As the totem pole is tied to the lineality of the missionaries' Bible, so the igloo was made possible by the primus stove.