Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980)
Canadian philosopher, futurist, and communications theorist.
Newton, and 'proper scientific method' after him, conducted attention to 'continuous description' of experimental phenomena instead of to causes.
Gutenberg made all history available as classified data: the transportable book brought the world of the dead into the space of the gentlemen's library; the telegraph brought the entire world of the living to the workman's breakfast table.
The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.
Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.
It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education & entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter.
The ways of thinking implanted by electronic culture are very different from those fostered by print culture. Since the Renaissance most methods and procedures have strongly tended towards stress on the visual organization of knowledge.
My method is vertical rather than horizontal so the scenery does not change but the texture does.
Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class.
Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society.
Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology.
The increase of visual stress among the Greeks alienated them from the primitive art that the electronic age now reinvents after interiorizing the “unified field” of electric all-at-onceness.
Today man has no physical body...He is translated into information, or an image.
Our book technology has Gutenberg at one end and the Ford assembly lines at the other. Both are obsolete.
Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.
Today, computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language.
Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been...destroyed by sudden environmental change.
Although the medium is the message, the controls go beyond programming. The restraints are always directed to the “content,” which is always another medium. The content of the press is literary statement, as the content of the book is speech, and the content of the movie is the novel. So the effects of radio are quite independent of its programming.
Sheer visual quantity evokes the magical resonance of the tribal hoard. The box office looms as a return to the echo chamber of bardic incantation.
Only puny secrets need protection. Big secrets are protected by public incredulity. You can actually dissipate a situation by giving it maximal coverage. As to alarming people, that's done by rumours, not by coverage.
It is always the psychic and social grounds, brought into play by each medium or technology, that readjust the balance of the hemispheres and of human sensibilities into equilibrium with those grounds.