Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980)
Canadian philosopher, futurist, and communications theorist.
As the totem pole is tied to the lineality of the missionaries' Bible, so the igloo was made possible by the primus stove.
Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.
The portability of the book, like that of the easel-painting, added much to the new culture of individualism.
School is the advertising agency which makes you believe you need the society as it is.
Interdeterminacy was a figure-ground problem arising from incongruity between the visual bias of classical science and the new acoustic sensibilities.
The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces.
The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
To say that a body or its gravitational field 'bends in space' in its vicinity is the discuss visual space in acoustic terms.
The world of the Greeks illustrates why visual appearances cannot interest people before the interiorization of alphabetic technology.
The medium is the message.
The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action.
Since Sputnik, the earth has been wrapped in a dome-like blanket or bubble. Nature ended.
To the blind all things are sudden.
Tactility is the space of the interval; acoustic space is spherical and resonant.
The mask, like the side-show freak, is mainly participatory rather than pictorial in its sensory appeal.
Print created national uniformity and government centralism, but also individualism and opposition to government as such.
It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV.
The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.
Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.
King Lear is a working model of the process of denudation by which men translate themselves from a world of roles to a world of jobs.