Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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.
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The divorce of poetry and music was first reflected by the printed page. (p. 227)
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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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Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.
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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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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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The medium is the message.
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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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Unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitutes a total and near-instanteous transformation of culture, values and attitudes.
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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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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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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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Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.
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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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We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
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Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world. (p. 30)
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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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As the totem pole is tied to the lineality of the missionaries' Bible, so the igloo was made possible by the primus stove.
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Environment is process, not container. (p. 30)
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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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Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.
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There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
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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.