Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Tactility is space of the interval.
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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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The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie.
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Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of 'what the public wants' played over its own nerves. (p. 68)
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The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity. (p. 135)
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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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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.
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Environments work us over and remake us. It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things. (p. 90)
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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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Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
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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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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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There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
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The anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic history in King Lear. (p. 18)
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The potential of any new technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors. (p. 210)
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People never remember but the computer never forgets. (p. 69)
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All advertising advertises advertising – no ad has its meaning alone. (p. 145)
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The sculptural qualities of the image dim down the purely personal identity. (p. 369)
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All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
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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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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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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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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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We are swiftly moving at present from an era where business was our culture into an era when culture will be our business. Between these poles stand the huge and ambiguous entertainment industries. (p. 384)