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.
At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology.
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.
The Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings.
The most human thing about us is our technology.
Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.
The field of 'information theory' began by using the old hardware paradigm of transportation of data from point to point.
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.
New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers.
Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century.
Art is whatever you can get away with.
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.
Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.
I heard what you were saying. You - you know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.
If we sit and talk in a dark room, words suddenly aquire new meanings and different textures...and on the radio. Given only the sound of a play, we have to fill in all of the senses, not just the sight of the action. So much do-it-yourself, or completion and “closure” of action, develops a kind of independent isolation in the young that makes them remote and inaccessible.”
Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.
Literacy, in translating man out of the closed world of tribal depth and resonance, gave man an eye for an ear and ushered him into a visual open world of specialized and divided consciousness.
The uniformity and repeatability of print created the “political arithmetic” of the seventeenth century and the “hedonistic calculus” of the eighteenth.
Language is a sense, like touch.
Environment is process, not container.