Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980)
Canadian philosopher, futurist, and communications theorist.
In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.
By simply moving information and brushing information against information, any medium whatever creates vast wealth.
Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society.
The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.
There are no connections in resonant space. There are only interfaces and metamorphoses.
Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village size and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumour, and personal malice.
The culture-heroes of preliteracy and postliteracy alike are robots.
The reduction of the tactile qualities of life and language constitute the refinement sought in the Renaissance and repudiated now in the electronic age.
The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods.
Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.
Acoustic space is totally discontinuous, like touch. It is a sphere without centers or margins.
The newspaper is a corporate symbolist poem, environmental and invisible, as poem.
The meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience. The content of new situations, both private and corporate, is typically the preceding situation.
The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it’s the universal experience of TV watchers.
The automated presidential surrogate is the superlative nobody.
The Greeks invented both their artistic and scientific novelties after the interiorization of the alphabet.
The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.
Cervantes confronted typographic man in the figure of Don Quixote.
The Homeric hero becomes a split-man as he assumes an individual ego.
For me any of the little gestures I make are all tentative probes. That's why I feel free to make them sound as outrageous or extreme as possible. Until you make it extreme, the probe is not very efficient.