Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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The electronic age is a world in which causes and effects become almost interchangeable, as in music structures. (p. 99)
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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 more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity. (p. 135)
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Q: Do you feel a need to be distinctive and mass-produced? Q: Are you in the groove? That is, are you moving in ever-diminishing circles? Q: How often do you change your mind, your politics, your clothes? (p. 121-125)
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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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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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The typographic lore of school children points to the gap between the scribal and typographic man. (p. 103)
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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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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 ways of thinking implanted by electronic culture are very different from those fostered by print culture. Since the Renaissance most methods and procedures have strongly tended towards stress on the visual organization of knowledge.
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The hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light.
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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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The levelling of inflexion and of wordplay became part of the program of applied knowledge in the seventeenth century. (p. 265)
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Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today.
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The mask, like the side-show freak, is mainly participatory rather than pictorial in its sensory appeal. (p. 352)
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The divorce of poetry and music was first reflected by the printed page. (p. 227)
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Jokes are grievances.
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Great ages of innovation are the ages in which entire cultures are junked or scrapped. (p. 309)
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The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.
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The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer.
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Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.
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In Catch-22, the figure of the black market and the ground of war merge into a monster presided over by the syndicate. When war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood. (p. 211)
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Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of 'what the public wants' played over its own nerves. (p. 68)
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Money is just the poor man's credit card.