Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980)
Canadian philosopher, futurist, and communications theorist.
At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.
Today men’s nerves surround us; they have gone outside as electrical environment.
The press is a group confessional form that provides communal participation. The book is a private confessional form that provides a “point of view.”
In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud.
Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a manmade environment that ends "Nature" and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed. Shakespeare at the Globe mentioning "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players" (As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7) has been justified by recent events in ways that would have struck him as entirely paradoxical. The results of living inside a proscenium arch of satellites is that the young now accept the public spaces of the earth as role-playing areas. Sensing this, they adopt costumes and roles and are ready to "do their thing" everywhere." (p.9-10)
All media are extensions of some human faculty -- psychic or physical.
At the speed of light, political policies and parties yield place to charismatic images.
The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures.
The artists of our culture, 'the antennae of the race,' had tuned in to the new ground and begun exploring discontinuity and simultaneity.
Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world.
The hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light.
The discarnate TV user lives in a world between fantasy and dream, and is in a typically hypnotic state, which is the ultimate form and level of participation.
Great ages of innovation are the ages in which entire cultures are junked or scrapped.
Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.
The user of the electric light -- or a hammer, or a language, or a book -- is the content. As such, there is a total metamorphosis of the user by the interface. It is the metamorphosis that I consider the message.
The Chinese used the intervals between things as the primary means of getting 'in touch' with situations.
The images of mankind have become the most basic thing about them. And they're all software, and disembodied.
Bacon's Adam is a medieval mystic and Milton's a trade union organizer.
Headlines are icons, not literature.
Bless advertising art for its pictorial vitality and verbal creativity.