Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Applied knowledge in the Renaissance had to take the form of translation of the auditory into visual terms, of the plastic into retinal form. (p. 180)
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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 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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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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Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
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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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New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.
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We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.
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The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community.
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Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.
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Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.
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A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
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The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb. (p. 55)
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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.
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The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati.
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The manuscript shaped medieval literary conventions at all levels. (p. 99)
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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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The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie.
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The medium is the message.
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Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.
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The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of culture, as Harold Innis was the first to show. (p. 56)
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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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Instead of scurrying into a corner and wailing about what media are doing to us, one should charge straight ahead and kick them in the electrodes.
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Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama. (p. 275)