Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980)
Canadian philosopher, futurist, and communications theorist.
Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech.
Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.
Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.
Art is whatever you can get away with.
Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century.
New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers.
When Coleridge said that all men are born either Platonists or Aristotelians, he was saying that all men tend to be either acoustic or visual in their sensory bias.
The field of 'information theory' began by using the old hardware paradigm of transportation of data from point to point.
Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.
The most human thing about us is our technology.
The Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings.
The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature...The new media are not ways of relating us to the old world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.
At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology.
Rabelais offers a vision of the future of print culture as a consumer's paradise of applied knowledge.
Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.
In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.
The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.
There is nothing willful or arbitrary about the Innis mode of expression. Were it to be translated into perspective prose, it would not only require huge space, but the insight into the modes of interplay among forms of organisation would also be lost. Innis sacrificed point of view and prestige to his sense of the urgent need for insight. A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding. As Innis got more insight he abandoned any mere point of view in his presentation of knowlege. When he interrelates the development of the steam press with 'the consolidation of the vernaculars' and the rise of nationalism and revolution he is not reporting anybody's point of view, least of all his own. He is setting up a mosaic configuration or galaxy for insight … Innis makes no effort to "spell out" the interrelations between the components in his galaxy. He offers no consumer packages in his later work, but only do-it-yourself kits...
The new electric environment of simultaneous and diversified information creates acoustic man. He is surrounded by sound – from behind, from the side, from above. His environment is made up of information in all kinds of simultaneous forms, and he puts on this electric environment as we put on our clothes, or as the fish puts on water.
Every process pushed far enough tends to reverse or flip suddenly. Chiasmus – the reversal to process caused by increasing its speed, scope or size.