Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980)
Canadian philosopher, futurist, and communications theorist.
Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama.
One of the things that happens at the speed of light is that people lose their goals in life. So what takes the place of goals and objectives? Well, role-playing is coming in very fast.
Dantzig explains why the language of number had to be increased to meet the needs created by the new technology of letters.
I don't explain—I explore.
People never remember but the computer never forgets.
While people are engaged in creating a totally different world, they always form vivid images of the preceding world.
Youth instinctively understand the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.
The media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage.
We are not Argus-eyed, but Argus-eared.
Typography cracked the voices of silence.
As Narcissus fell in love with an outering (projection, extension) of himself, man seems invariably to fall in love with the newest gadget or gimmick that is merely an extension of his own body.
The human family now exists under conditions of a global village. We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums.
Each of our senses makes its own space, but no sense can function in isolation. Only as sight relates the touch, or kinaesthesia, or sound, can the eye see.
While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.
The media themselves are the avant-garde of our society. Avant-garde no longer exists in painting, music and poetry, it's the media themselves.
Poetry and the arts can’t exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind.
The 4 aspects of each of the media actually constitute the four features of all metaphors. In other words, all human technologies whatever are, in the fullest sense, linguistic outerings, or utterings, of man.
Art is anything you can get away with.
Prolonged mimesis of the alphabet and its fragmenting properties produced a new dominant mode of perception and then of culture.
The levelling of inflexion and of wordplay became part of the program of applied knowledge in the seventeenth century.