Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980)
Canadian philosopher, futurist, and communications theorist.
[On Jimmy Carter] "Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he puts nostalgia in its place."
The media have substituted themselves for the older world.
Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information.
By involving all men in all men, by the electric extension of their own nervous systems, the new technology turns the figure of the primitive society into a universal ground that buries all previous figures.
Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always preceed causes in the actual developmental order.
The mosaic form of the TV image demands participation and involvement in depth, of the whole being, as does the sense of touch.
With TV, came the icon, the inclusive image, the inclusive political posture or stance.
Bless Madison Ave for restoring the magical art of the cavemen to suburbia.
Human perception is literally incarnation.
The invention of typography confirmed and extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly repeatable “commodity,” the first assembly-line, and the first mass-production.
All media of communications are cliches serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns of associations and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness.
Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.
Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness...This is a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man.
Language alone includes all the senses in interplay at all times.
There is no connection between the elements in an electric world, which is equivalent to being surrounded by the human unconscious.
Typography extended its character to the regulation and fixation of languages.
The coverage is the war. If there were no coverage, there'd be no war. Yes, the newsmen and the mediamen around the world are actually the fighters, not the soldiers anymore.
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.
Invention is the mother of all necessities.
The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography. The printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, created extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly.