Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980)
Canadian philosopher, futurist, and communications theorist.
Each tetrad gives the etymology of its subject, as an uttering or outering of the body physical or mental, and provides its anatomy in fourfold exegetical manner.
Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure but metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing in terms of another.
Typography as the first mechanization of a handicraft is itself the perfect instance not of a new knowledge, but of applied knowledge.
Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception.
Everybody at the speed of light tends to become a nobody.
Disarmament is illogical and futile, unless one is prepared to regard the available means of production and social organization as affording unique social ends. To divert electrical energy and circuitry into atomic bombs shows the same imaginative power as wiring the dining-room chairs to enable one to electrocute the sitter in the event that he might prove hostile. It is part of the age-old habit of using new means for old purposes instead of discovering what are the new goals contained in the new means.
The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.
The dyslexic: Everyman as cubist.
The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive.
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.
Rabelais offers a vision of the future of print culture as a consumer's paradise of applied knowledge.
We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.
One touch of nature makes the whole world tin.
Every process pushed far enough tends to reverse or flip suddenly. Chiasmus – the reversal to process caused by increasing its speed, scope or size.
Primitivism has become the vulgar cliche of much modern art and speculation.
Literate man, civilized man, tends to restrict and to separate functions, whereas tribal man has freely extended the form of his body to include the universe.