Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Tactility is space of the interval.
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As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.
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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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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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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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There is no connection between the elements in an electric world, which is equivalent to being surrounded by the human unconscious. (p. 260)
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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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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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Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech.
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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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Great ages of innovation are the ages in which entire cultures are junked or scrapped. (p. 309)
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The manuscript shaped medieval literary conventions at all levels. (p. 99)
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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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Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.
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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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Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.
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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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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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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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Casting my perils before swains.
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The percept takes priority of the concept.
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Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.
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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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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)