Marshall McLuhan quotes - page 5

There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation. (Marshall McLuhan)
The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived with the figure minus ground. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The public has yet to see TV as TV. Broadcasters have no awareness of its potential. The movie people are just beginning to get a grasp on film. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The laws of the media, in tetrad form, bring logos and formal cause up to date to reveal analytically the structure of all human artefacts. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures. (Marshall McLuhan)
Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
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. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
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. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The victory over Euclidean space was not achieved by isolated individuals, but by a field of young rebels opposed to all absolutes. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience. The content of new situations, both private and corporate, is typically the preceding situation. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
It is always the psychic and social grounds, brought into play by each medium or technology, that readjust the balance of the hemispheres and of human sensibilities into equilibrium with those grounds. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions. (Marshall McLuhan)
Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The media have substituted themselves for the older world. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance. View quote
Marshall McLuhan