Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980)
Canadian philosopher, futurist, and communications theorist.
America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy — the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the USA.
The extreme distraction presented by the acoustic and cinematic rivals of the book brings decreasing opportunities for attentive and uninterrupted reading.
The book is a private confessional form that provides a “point of view.”
The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message.
Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.
New art is sensory violence on the frontiers of experience.
The hot radio medium used in cool or nonliterate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment.
The magic of the cave image lies in its being, not in its being seen. The symbolic does not refer. It is.
Another theme of the Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is "pastimes are past times". The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the twentieth century the number of past times that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of doubleness and interplay since this kind of hendiadys-dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy.
The stock market was created by the telegraph and the telephone, and its panics are engineered by carefully orchestrated stories in the press.
The new overkill is simply an extension of our nervous system into a total ecological service environment. Such a service environment can liquidate or terminate its beneficiaries as naturally as it sustains them.
Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly. (p.73 of the 1966 Signet paperback edition)
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.
The anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic history in King Lear.
Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.
The mother tongue is propaganda.
There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.
We now live in a technologically prepared environment that blankets the earth itself. The humanly contrived environment of electric information and power has begun to take precedence over the old environment of "nature." Nature, as it were, begins to be the content of our technology
By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.
Percepts of existence always lie behind concepts of nature.