Marshall McLuhan quotes - page 18

The levelling of inflexion and of wordplay became part of the program of applied knowledge in the seventeenth century. (Marshall McLuhan)
Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
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. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Rabelais offers a vision of the future of print culture as a consumer's paradise of applied knowledge. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Marlowe anticipated Whitman's barbaric yawp by setting up a national PA system of blank verse – a rising iambic system of sound to suit the new success story. (Marshall McLuhan)
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. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology. (p. 300) View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Environment is process, not container. (p. 30) View quote
Marshall McLuhan
"Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
For me any of the little gestures I make are all tentative probes. That's why I feel free to make them sound as outrageous or extreme as possible. Until you make it extreme, the probe is not very efficient. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The artists of our culture, 'the antennae of the race,' had tuned in to the new ground and begun exploring discontinuity and simultaneity. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Newton, and 'proper scientific method' after him, conducted attention to 'continuous description' of experimental phenomena instead of to causes. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The media themselves are the avant-garde of our society. Avant-garde no longer exists in painting, music and poetry, it's the media themselves. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity. (p. 135) View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Language is a sense, like touch. (p. 271) (Marshall McLuhan)
The news automatically becomes the real world for the TV user and is not a substitute for reality, but is itself an immediate reality. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Only the vanquished remember history. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Transmitted at the speed of light, all events on this planet are simultaneous. In the electric environment of information all events are simultaneous, there is no time or space separating events. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression. View quote
Marshall McLuhan