Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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.
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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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Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.
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The Greeks invented both their artistic and scientific novelties after the interiorization of the alphabet. (p. 66)
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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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The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie.
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The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.
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In tetrad form, the artefact is seen to be not netural or passive, but an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground.
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Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.
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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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Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.
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By involving all men in all men, by the electric extension of their own nervous systems, the new technology turns the figure of the primitive society into a universal ground that buries all previous figures. (p. 25)
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When we invent a new technology, we become cannibals. We eat ourselves alive since these technologies are merely extensions of ourselves. The new environment shaped by electric technology is a cannibalistic one that eats people. To survive one must study the habits of cannibals. (p. 261)
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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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The manuscript shaped medieval literary conventions at all levels. (p. 99)
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The medium is the message.
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We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
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The hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light.
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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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Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.
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For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
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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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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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People in new environments always produce the new preceptual modality without any difficulty or awareness of change. It is later that the psychic and social realignments baffle societies.