Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980)
Canadian philosopher, futurist, and communications theorist.
Chinese script is not visual but iconic and tactile. It does not disturb the tribal bonds.
Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration.
The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community.
Q: Why is America the land of the overrated child and the underrated adult? Q: How can children grow up in a world in which adults idolize youthfulness? Q: What happens when the ad makers taker over all the popular myths and poetry?
The print-made split between head and heart is the trauma which affects Europe from Machiavelli till the present.
The metropolis today is a classroom; the ads are its teachers. The traditional classroom is an obsolete detention home, a feudal dungeon.
TV is not good at covering single events. It needs a ritual, a rhythm, and a pattern...[TV] tends to fosters patterns rather than events.
Tactility is space of the interval.
The public has yet to see TV as TV. Broadcasters have no awareness of its potential. The movie people are just beginning to get a grasp on film.
There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.
Casting my perils before swains.
All words at every level of prose and poetry and all devices of language and speech derive their meaning from figure / ground relation.
When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.
In tetrad form, the artefact is seen to be not netural or passive, but an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground.
The pre-atomist multisensory void was an animate, pulsating, and moving vibrant interval, neither container nor contained, acoustic space penetrated by tactility.
All media exists to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values.
In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.
War is never anything less than accelerated technological change.
Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.
We live invested in an electric information environment that is quite as imperceptible to us as water is to fish.