Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space.
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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 global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.
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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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All words at every level of prose and poetry and all devices of language and speech derive their meaning from figure / ground relation.
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The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
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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 TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces.
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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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Money is just the poor man's credit card.
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Headlines are icons, not literature. (p. 5)
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King Lear is a working model of the process of denudation by which men translate themselves from a world of roles to a world of jobs. (p. 16)
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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 divorce of poetry and music was first reflected by the printed page. (p. 227)
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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 space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos – resonant utterance or word.
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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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All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
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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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All media of communications are cliches serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns of associations and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness.
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Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog. (p. 13)
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The new overkill is simply an extension of our nervous system into a total ecological service environment. Such a service environment can liquidate or terminate its beneficiaries as naturally as it sustains them. (p. 152)
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There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation.
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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.