Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980)
Canadian philosopher, futurist, and communications theorist.
The “natural magic” of the camera obscura anticipated Hollywood in turning the spectacle of the external world into a consumer commodity or package.
The twentieth century encounter between alphabetic and electronic forces of culture confers on the printed word a crucial role in staying the return to “the Africa within.”
The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie.
Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode – a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.
The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.
Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space, where the Eskimo now lives: boundless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this dark bog.
All of man's artefacts, whether hardware or software, whether bulldozers or laws of chemistry, are alike linguistic in structure and intent.
Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on.
The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the ground rules of the environment. The ground rules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serves as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware.
The typographic logic created “the outsider,” the alienated mass, as the type of integral, that is, intuitive and irrational, man.
Suppose he is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov --- what if he is right?
Visual space is the space of detachment. Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement.
Paradox is the technique for seizing the conflicting aspects of any problem. Paradox coalesces or telescopes various facets of a complex process in a single instant.
We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation. (xx)
When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments.
The digital divide is alive and growing stronger. This reality has made it imperative not to lose sight of the political economic infrastructures of media technologies and certainly never to take McLuhan's metaphors too literally.
A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space.