Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980)
Canadian philosopher, futurist, and communications theorist.
Left hemisphere industrialism has blinded the Chinese to the effects of our alphabet: pattern recognition is in the right hemisphere.
The sociologist permits himself to see only what is acceptable to his colleagues.
The literate man is a sucker for propaganda...You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas.
Manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication as performance.
One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information system.
When we invent a new technology, we become cannibals. We eat ourselves alive since these technologies are merely extensions of ourselves. The new environment shaped by electric technology is a cannibalistic one that eats people. To survive one must study the habits of cannibals.
We are numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture.
We begin again to structure the primordial feelings...from which 3000 years of literacy divorced us. We begin again to live a myth.
In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.
Current concern with reading and spelling reform steers away from visual to auditory stress.
Languages are environments to which the child related synesthetically.
A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters.
Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status.
Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.
The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators.
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.
Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.
The Gutenberg galaxy was theoretically dissolved in 1905 with the discovery of curved space, but in practice it had been invaded by the telegraph two generations before that.
Non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training.
Formal logic and the logical syllogism encapsulate connectedness in reasoning.