Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980)
Canadian philosopher, futurist, and communications theorist.
Environments work us over and remake us. It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things.
The "tragic flaw" is not a detail of characterization, a mere "fly in the ointment", but a structural feature of ordinary consciousness.
Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.
For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world.
Even pacifist agitation or the nation-wide fever of big sports competitions acts as a spur to war fever in circumstances like ours. Any kind of excitement or emotion contributes to the possibility of dangerous explosions when the feelings of huge populations are kept inflamed even in peacetime for the sake of the advancement of commerce. Headlines mean street sales. It takes emotion to move merchandise. And wars and rumors of wars are the merchandise and also the emotion of the popular press.
The unformulated message of an assembly of news items from every quarter of the globe is that the world today is one city. All war is civil war. All suffering is our own.
Nobody can doubt that the entire range of applied science contributes to the very format of a newspaper. But the headline is a feature which began with the Napoleonic Wars. The headline is a primitive shout of rage, triumph, fear, or warning, and newspapers have thrived on wars ever since.
When you move into a new area, a new territory and learn a new language, the language is not a new subject, it is an environment, it is total.
Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.
My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.
The method of the twentieth century is to use not single but multiple models for experimental exploration – the technique of the suspended judgement.
Literacy affects the physiology as well as the psychic life of the African.
At the speed of light there is no sequence; everything happens at the same instant.
Does the interiorization of media such as letters alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes?
A fixed point of view becomes possible with print and ends the image as a plastic organism.
Every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience.
There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation.
The greatest propaganda in the world is our mother tongue, that is what we learn as children, and which we learn unconsciously. That shapes our perceptions for life. That is propaganda at its most extreme form.
I am not a "culture critic" because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world.