Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980)
Canadian philosopher, futurist, and communications theorist.
Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology.
The young are really the hairs to a generation of incompetence.
The Concept of Dread, by Soren Kierkegaard, appeared in 1844, first year of the commercial telegraph...It mentions the telegraph as a reason for dread and nowness or existenz.
We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity.
PLAYBOY: A Columbia coed was recently quoted in Newsweek as equating you and LSD. “LSD doesn’t mean anything until you consume it,” she said. “Likewise McLuhan.” Do you see any similarities?
Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perception...When these ratios change, men change.
When we put our central nervous system outside us we returned to the primal nomadic state.
Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes.
Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses.
The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication...is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts.
All of the new media have enriched our perceptions of language and older media. They are to the man-made environment what species are to biology.
I've always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened.
Privacy invasion is now one of biggest knowledge industries.
The potential of any new technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors.
Interface, of the resonant interval as 'where the action is', whether chemical, psychic or social, involves touch.
Marlowe anticipated Whitman's barbaric yawp by setting up a national PA system of blank verse – a rising iambic system of sound to suit the new success story.
The existential trauma had a physical basis in the first electric extension of our nervous system.
We have become like the most primitive Palaeolithic man, once more global wanderers, but information gatherers rather than food gatherers. From now on the source of food, wealth and life itself will be information.