Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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 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 spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.
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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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The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature. (p. 14)
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Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.
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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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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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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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The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.
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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 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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Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.
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It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education & entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter.
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Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.
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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 typographic logic created 'the outsider,' the alienated mass, as the type of integral, that is, intuitive and irrational, man. (p. 241)
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As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.'
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Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave. (p. 280)
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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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The divorce of poetry and music was first reflected by the printed page. (p. 227)
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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.