Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980)
Canadian philosopher, futurist, and communications theorist.
Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies.
The manuscript shaped medieval literary conventions at all levels.
The more data banks record about us, the less we exist.
War has become the environment of our time if only because it is an accelerated form of innovation and education.
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.
Logic is figure without a ground.
Computers can do better than ever what needn’t be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly.
Language is a form of organized stutter.
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.
Until more than two centuries after printing nobody discovered how to maintain a single tone or attitude throughout a prose composition.
Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very week identity.
If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.
Violence is the effort to maintain and restore a weakened psyche.
Older cliches are retrieved both as inherent principles that inform the new ground and new awareness, and as archetypal nostalgia figures with transformed meaning in relation to the new ground.
Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension.
Without an anti-environment, all environments are invisible.
The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of culture, as Harold Innis was the first to show.
The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature.
The new science of communication is percept, not concept.
Writing turned a spotlight on the high, dim Sierras of speech; writing was the visualization of acoustic space. It lit up the dark.