Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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The sculptural qualities of the image dim down the purely personal identity. (p. 369)
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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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Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.
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Money is just the poor man's credit card.
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On Jimmy Carter 'Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he puts nostalgia in its place.'
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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 hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light.
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There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
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The medium is the message.
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The telegraph press mosaic is acoustic space as much as an electric circus.
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The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie.
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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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PLAYBOY: A Columbia coed was recently quoted in Newsweek as equating you and LSD. 'LSD doesn’t mean anything until you consume it,' she said. 'Likewise McLuhan.' Do you see any similarities?
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It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.
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All advertising advertises advertising – no ad has its meaning alone. (p. 145)
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Bless Madison Ave for restoring the magical art of the cavemen to suburbia. (p. 130)
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New media are new languages, their grammar and syntax yet unknown.
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Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today.
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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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The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.
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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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The potential of any new technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors. (p. 210)
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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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An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.