Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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The telegraph press mosaic is acoustic space as much as an electric circus.
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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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Money is just the poor man's credit card.
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I neither approve nor disapprove. I merely try to understand. Sexual freedom is as natural to newly tribalized youth as drugs.
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Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today.
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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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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 future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb. (p. 55)
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The Gutenberg galaxy was theoretically dissolved in 1905 with the discovery of curved space, but in practice it had been invaded by the telegraph two generations before that. (p. 286)
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The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature...The new media are not ways of relating us to the old world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.
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People never remember but the computer never forgets. (p. 69)
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Affluence creates poverty.
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Cervantes confronted typographic man in the figure of Don Quixote. (p. 242)
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The sculptural qualities of the image dim down the purely personal identity. (p. 369)
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The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.
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New media are new languages, their grammar and syntax yet unknown.
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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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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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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 criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer.
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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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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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There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
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Aretino, like Rabelais and Cervantes, proclaimed the meaning of Typography as Gargantuan, Fantastic, Supra-human. (p. 220)