Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980)
Canadian philosopher, futurist, and communications theorist.
The electronic age is a world in which causes and effects become almost interchangeable, as in music structures.
Philosophy was as naive as science in its unconscious acceptance of the assumptions or dynamic of typography.
The present volume to this point might be regarded as a gloss on a single text of Harold Innis: "The effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century."
Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.
The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati.
Every technology contrived and “outered” by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization.
Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.
Print, in turning the vernaculars into mass media, or closed systems, created the uniform, centralizing forces of modern nationalism.
After childhood, the senses specialize via the channels of dominant technologies and social weaponries.
Each new technology is a reprogramming of sensory life.
There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening. [A chapter sub-heading attributed by McLuhan to Alfred North Whitehead]
The city no longer exists except as a cultural ghost for tourists. Any highway eatery with its TV set, newspaper and magazine is as cosmopolitan as New York or Paris.
Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of communal interdependence.
The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer.
The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.
Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space.
Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.
Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.
I neither approve nor disapprove. I merely try to understand. Sexual freedom is as natural to newly tribalized youth as drugs.
By surpassing writing, we have regained our wholeness, not on a national or cultural but cosmic plane.