Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.
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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 touch of nature makes the whole world tin.
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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 Eskimo, like any pre-literate, leaps easily from the Paleolithic stone age to the electric age, by-passing the Neolithic specialism.
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Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.
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The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy. (p. 154)
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We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
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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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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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Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama. (p. 275)
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The manuscript shaped medieval literary conventions at all levels. (p. 99)
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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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In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. (p. 125)
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The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture. (p. 168)
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The unformulated message of an assembly of news items from every quarter of the globe is that the world today is one city. All war is civil war. All suffering is our own.
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The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
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The medium is the message.
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The logos of creation, 'And God Said ...' formed the basis of Christian interpretation of the 'Book of Nature.'
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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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Our senses are not receptors so much as reactors and makers of different modalities of space. Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things, but the very life of things in the mind. (p. 256)
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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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Bacon's Adam is a medieval mystic and Milton's a trade union organizer. (p. 214)
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Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception.