QUOTES by Marshall McLuhan
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My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
The medium, or process, of our time - electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
All the new media are art forms which have the power of imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the "Tower of Babel" by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant tr
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of communal interdependence.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
The potential of any technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors...Computer are still serving mainly to sustain precomputer effects.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.'
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot...for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
The literate man is a sucker for propaganda...You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
[On Jimmy Carter] "Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he puts nostalgia in its place.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
"Work" does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
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.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
The hallucinogenic world, in environmental terms, can be considered as a forlorn effort of man to match the speed of power of hisextended nervous system (which we call the "electronic world") by intensifying the activity of his inner nervous system.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
Nowadays there is no conversation at all. Teachers distrust talk as much as business men.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
Ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion...
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
You see, Dad, Professor McLuhan says that the environment that man creates becomes his medium for defining his role in it. The invention of type created linear, or sequential thought, separating thought from action. Now, with TV and folk singing, thought and action are closer and social involvement is greater. We again live in a village. Get it?
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the "Tower of Babel" by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant tr
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and specialise, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The 'expert' is the man who stays put.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan
What is very little understood about the electronic age is that it angelizes man, disembodies him. Turns him into software.
Quote by -Marshall McLuhan