Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980)
Canadian philosopher, futurist, and communications theorist.
People don't actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.
All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody.
Our senses are not receptors so much as reactors and makers of different modalities of space. Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things, but the very life of things in the mind.
In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin.
With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life.
Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity.
The medieval student had to be paleographer, editor, and publisher of the authors he read.
For the oral man the literal text contains all possible levels of meaning.
The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived with the figure minus ground.
The Eskimo, like any pre-literate, leaps easily from the Paleolithic stone age to the electric age, by-passing the Neolithic specialism.
Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind.
Aretino, like Rabelais and Cervantes, proclaimed the meaning of Typography as Gargantuan, Fantastic, Supra-human.
A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various externalizations of our senses.
The “interface” of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism – a formula for blitz and metamorphosis.
World War I a railway war of centralization and encirclement. World War II a radio war of decentralization concluded by the Bomb. World War III a TV guerrilla war with no divisions between civil and military fronts.
We are swiftly moving at present from an era where business was our culture into an era when culture will be our business. Between these poles stand the huge and ambiguous entertainment industries.
Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space...it is a cosmic, invisible architecture of the human dark.
Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. We lose "touch" without it. Visual space is the space of detachment.
The victory over Euclidean space was not achieved by isolated individuals, but by a field of young rebels opposed to all absolutes.
World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.