Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980)
Canadian philosopher, futurist, and communications theorist.
New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers.
Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century.
Art is whatever you can get away with.
Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.
Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.
The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces.
The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.
It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV.
Print created national uniformity and government centralism, but also individualism and opposition to government as such.
The mask, like the side-show freak, is mainly participatory rather than pictorial in its sensory appeal.
Tactility is the space of the interval; acoustic space is spherical and resonant.
To the blind all things are sudden.
Since Sputnik, the earth has been wrapped in a dome-like blanket or bubble. Nature ended.
The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action.
The medium is the message.
The world of the Greeks illustrates why visual appearances cannot interest people before the interiorization of alphabetic technology.
To say that a body or its gravitational field 'bends in space' in its vicinity is the discuss visual space in acoustic terms.
The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
Literacy, in translating man out of the closed world of tribal depth and resonance, gave man an eye for an ear and ushered him into a visual open world of specialized and divided consciousness.
Language is a sense, like touch.