Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.
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The 4 aspects of each of the media actually constitute the four features of all metaphors. In other words, all human technologies whatever are, in the fullest sense, linguistic outerings, or utterings, of man. (p. 275)
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Unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitutes a total and near-instanteous transformation of culture, values and attitudes.
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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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While people are engaged in creating a totally different world, they always form vivid images of the preceding world. (p. 21)
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Marx shared with economists then and since the inability to make his concepts include innovational processes. It is one thing to spot a new product but quite another to observe the invisible new environments generated by the action of the product on a variety of pre-existing social grounds. (p. 63)
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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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With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life. (p. 177)
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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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Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.
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Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.
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Jokes are grievances.
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Art is anything you can get away with.
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Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.
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Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.
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Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class. (p. 136)
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Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.
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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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Writing turned a spotlight on the high, dim Sierras of speech; writing was the visualization of acoustic space. It lit up the dark. (p. 14)
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The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
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We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.
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The divorce of poetry and music was first reflected by the printed page. (p. 227)
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The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it’s the universal experience of TV watchers.
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The book is a private confessional form that provides a 'point of view.'