Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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I am not a 'culture critic' because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world.
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When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.
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The print-made split between head and heart is the trauma which affects Europe from Machiavelli till the present. (p. 193)
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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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Try not to have Emily exposed to hours and hours of TV. It is a vile drug which permeates the nervous system, especially in the young.
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The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
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We are numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture. (p. 16)
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Gutenberg made all history available as classified data: the transportable book brought the world of the dead into the space of the gentlemen's library; the telegraph brought the entire world of the living to the workman's breakfast table. (p. 15)
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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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Unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitutes a total and near-instanteous transformation of culture, values and attitudes.
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Art is anything you can get away with.
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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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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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The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community.
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One of the things that happens at the speed of light is that people lose their goals in life. So what takes the place of goals and objectives? Well, role-playing is coming in very fast.
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All advertising advertises advertising – no ad has its meaning alone. (p. 145)
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Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
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With TV, came the icon, the inclusive image, the inclusive political posture or stance. (p. 191)
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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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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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Pornography and obscenity...work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground - situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks.
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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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Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
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The potential of any new technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors. (p. 210)