Philosophers From Canada

"Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation. (p. 362)"

"The sculptural qualities of the image dim down the purely personal identity. (p. 369)"

"The sociologist permits himself to see only what is acceptable to his colleagues. (p. 370)"

"By electricity we have not been driven out of our senses so much as our senses have been driven out of us. (p. 375)"

"Violence is the effort to maintain and restore a weakened psyche. (p. 377)"

"War has become the environment of our time if only because it is an accelerated form of innovation and education. (p. 381)"

"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. (p. 384)"

"It is perhaps typical of very creative minds that they hit very large nails not quite on the head."

"Suppose he is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov --- what if he is right?"

"Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin'?"

"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."

"1968 was a time of shocking modernism, and modernism always fascinates the young and perplexes the old, yet in retrospect it was a time of an almost quaint innocence. Imagine Columbia students in New York and University of Paris students discovering from a distance that their experiences were similar and then meeting, gingerly approaching one another to find out what, if anything, they had in common. With amazement and excitement, people learned that they were using the same tactics in Prague, in Paris, in Rome, in Mexico, in New York. With new tools such as communication satellites and inexpensive erasable videotape, television was making everyone very aware of what everyone else was doing, and it was thrilling because for the first time in human experience the important, distant events of the day were immediate. It will never be new again. “Global village” is a sixties term invented by Marshall McLuhan. The shrinking of the globe will never be so shocking in the same way that we will never again feel the thrill of the first moon shots or the first broadcasts from outer space. We now live in a world in which we await a new breakthrough every day. If another 1968 generation is ever produced, its movements will all have Web sites, carefully monitored by law enforcement, while they are e-mailing one another for updates. And no doubt other tools will be invented. But even the idea of new inventions has become banal."

"Marshall McLuhan prophesized that the global electronic age would bring about a rebirth of oral culture. He wrote that orality breeds complexity while literacy breeds homogeneity. The nonlinear understanding of space-time characteristic of oral cultures is making a comeback in the new context created by the Internet and globalization. Latin America, with its immense diversity of languages and cultures, offers a prolific reservoir for the future. The richness of its poetry stems from the interaction between oral culture and literacy, which creates fertile ground for experimentation. The new historical developments point to a much wider participation by women and indigenous poets writing in their own languages. A wide range of migrant or nomadic voices add to its complexity. Dante Alighieri wrote in the fourteenth century that the spirit of poetry abounds "in the tangled constructions and defective pronunciations" of vernacular speech where language is renewed and transformed. His vision resonates today with the faulty speech of migrants creating the sounds and intonations of the future."

"The present is always invisible because it's environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention."

"Current concern with reading and spelling reform steers away from visual to auditory stress. (p. 54)"

"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.” (p. 51)"

"A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various externalizations of our senses. (p. 49)"

"When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized. (p. 47)"

"African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film. (p. 44)"

"Non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training. (p. 41)"

"Literacy affects the physiology as well as the psychic life of the African. (p. 38)"

"What began as a "Romantic reaction" towards organic wholeness may or may not have hastened the discovery of electro-magnetic waves. But certainly the electro-magnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous "field" in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under conditions of a "global village." We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums. So that concern with the "primitive" today is as banal as nineteenth-century concern with "progress," and as irrelevant to our problems. The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village. (p. 36)"

"Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world. (p. 30)"

"Does the interiorization of media such as letters alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes? (p. 28)"

"Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy. (p. 26)"

"The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world. (p. 21)"

"The anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic history in King Lear. (p. 18)"

"King Lear is a working model of the process of denudation by which men translate themselves from a world of roles to a world of jobs. (p. 16)"

"Literacy, in translating man out of the closed world of tribal depth and resonance, gave man an eye for an ear and ushered him into a visual open world of specialized and divided consciousness."

"Language is a form of organized stutter."

"The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature...The new media are not ways of relating us to the old world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will."

"Native societies did not think of themselves as being in the world as occupants but considered that their rituals created the world and keep it operational."

"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."

"In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point."

"Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally."

"The mother tongue is propaganda."

"There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew."

"If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting."

"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."

"The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces."

"New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media."

"When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result."

"Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment."

"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."

"For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role."

"Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception."

"The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods."

"Even pacifist agitation or the nation-wide fever of big sports competitions acts as a spur to war fever in circumstances like ours. Any kind of excitement or emotion contributes to the possibility of dangerous explosions when the feelings of huge populations are kept inflamed even in peacetime for the sake of the advancement of commerce. Headlines mean street sales. It takes emotion to move merchandise. And wars and rumors of wars are the merchandise and also the emotion of the popular press."

"Nobody can doubt that the entire range of applied science contributes to the very format of a newspaper. But the headline is a feature which began with the Napoleonic Wars. The headline is a primitive shout of rage, triumph, fear, or warning, and newspapers have thrived on wars ever since."

"Human perception is literally incarnation."