Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Marx shared with economists then and since the inability to make his concepts include innovational processes. It is one thing to spot a new product but quite another to observe the invisible new environments generated by the action of the product on a variety of pre-existing social grounds. (p. 63)
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King Lear is a working model of the process of denudation by which men translate themselves from a world of roles to a world of jobs. (p. 16)
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Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.
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Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.
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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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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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The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.
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Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.
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Today, computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. (p. 80)
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The 'interface' of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism – a formula for blitz and metamorphosis. (p. 161)
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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 now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies. (p. 86)
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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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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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Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
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Tactility is space of the interval.
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Environment is process, not container. (p. 30)
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All advertising advertises advertising – no ad has its meaning alone. (p. 145)
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We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation. (xx)
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Casting my perils before swains.
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In Catch-22, the figure of the black market and the ground of war merge into a monster presided over by the syndicate. When war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood. (p. 211)
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The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
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Print altered not only the spelling and grammar but the accentuation and inflection of languages, and made 'bad grammar' possible. (p. 263)
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The increase of visual stress among the Greeks alienated them from the primitive art that the electronic age now reinvents after interiorizing the 'unified field' of electric all-at-onceness. (p. 72)