Marshall McLuhan Quotes
The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement.
In Tetrad form, the artifact is seen to be not neutral or passive, bur an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground.
Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.
For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
All the new media are art forms which have the power of imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions.
What is very little understood about the electronic age is that it angelizes man, disembodies him. Turns him into software.
The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.
Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener.
Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode - a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.
By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.
Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.
People don't actually read newspapers - they get into them every morning like a hot bath.
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.
It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photograph that it isolates single moments in time.
If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves.
The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.
American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.
Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.
Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.
As the age of information demands the simultaneous use of all our faculties, we discover that we are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved.
There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.
Of the many unforeseen consequences of typography, the emergence of nationalism is, perhaps, the most familiar
Information and images bump against each other every day in massive quantities, and the resonance of this interfacing is like the babble of a village or tavern gossip session.
The cave art of Madison Avenue has been by far the most innovative and educative art form of the twentieth century.
To say that "the camera cannot lie" is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practised in its name.
Education, which should be helping youth to understand and adapt to their revolutionary new environments, is instead being used merely as an instrument of cultural aggression.
The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.
Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.
The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action.
If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.
Youth instinctively understand the present environment - the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.
The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
