Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980)
Canadian philosopher, futurist, and communications theorist.
Pornography and obscenity...work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground -- situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks.
People in new environments always produce the new preceptual modality without any difficulty or awareness of change. It is later that the psychic and social realignments baffle societies.
Try not to have Emily exposed to hours and hours of TV. It is a vile drug which permeates the nervous system, especially in the young.
Instead of scurrying into a corner and wailing about what media are doing to us, one should charge straight ahead and kick them in the electrodes.
Typography extended its character to the regulation and fixations of languages.
The "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.
A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor?
Print altered not only the spelling and grammar but the accentuation and inflection of languages, and made “bad grammar” possible.
The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.
The user is the content of any situation, whether its driving a car, or wearing clothes or watching a show. The user is content.
The message of radio is one of violent, unified implosion and resonance.
Jacques Ellul observes in Propaganda: When dialogue begins, propaganda ends. His theme, that propaganda is not this or that ideology but rather the action and coexistence of all media at once, explains why propaganda is environmental and invisible. The total life of any culture tends to be "propaganda", for this reason. It blankets perception and supresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom.
Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today.
All advertising advertises advertising – no ad has its meaning alone.
The divorce of poetry and music was first reflected by the printed page.
The typographic lore of school children points to the gap between the scribal and typographic man.
All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information. (p. 178-179)
Q: Do you feel a need to be distinctive and mass-produced? Q: Are you in the groove? That is, are you moving in ever-diminishing circles? Q: How often do you change your mind, your politics, your clothes? (p. 121-125)
In Chinese, honesty is the figure of a man standing, physically standing, beside his work. That means honesty: a man stands by his work. Two things: figure / ground.
Applied knowledge in the Renaissance had to take the form of translation of the auditory into visual terms, of the plastic into retinal form.