All Quotes

"Man in the electronic age has no possible environment except the globe and no possible occupation except information-gathering."

"Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure."

"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."

"As Narcissus fell in love with an outering (projection, extension) of himself, man seems invariably to fall in love with the newest gadget or gimmick that is merely an extension of his own body."

"When we put our central nervous system outside us we returned to the primal nomadic state."

"The ways of thinking implanted by electronic culture are very different from those fostered by print culture. Since the Renaissance most methods and procedures have strongly tended towards stress on the visual organization of knowledge."

"While people are engaged in creating a totally different world, they always form vivid images of the preceding world. (p. 21)"

"Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which humans communicate than by the content of the communication. (p. 23)"

"Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind. (p. 67)"

"The unique innovation of the phonetic alphabet released the Greeks from the universal acoustic spill of tribal societies. (p. 70)"

"There are no connections in resonant space. There are only interfaces and metamorphoses. (p. 75)"

"The electronic age is a world in which causes and effects become almost interchangeable, as in music structures. (p. 99)"

"When you move into a new area, a new territory and learn a new language, the language is not a new subject, it is an environment, it is total. (p. 105)"

"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)"

"The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity. (p. 135)"

"Q: Why is America the land of the overrated child and the underrated adult? Q: How can children grow up in a world in which adults idolize youthfulness? Q: What happens when the ad makers taker over all the popular myths and poetry? (p. 141)"

"All advertising advertises advertising – no ad has its meaning alone. (p. 145)"

"Languages are environments to which the child related synesthetically. (p. 166)"

"Every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience. (p. 171)"

"People don't actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath. (p. 184)"

"With TV, came the icon, the inclusive image, the inclusive political posture or stance. (p. 191)"

"The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive. (p. 201)"

"All of man's artefacts, whether hardware or software, whether bulldozers or laws of chemistry, are alike linguistic in structure and intent. (p. 227)"

"Logic is figure without a ground. (p. 241)"

"Language alone includes all the senses in interplay at all times. (p. 253)"

"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. (p. 256)"

"Language is a sense, like touch. (p. 271)"

"The 4 aspects of each of the media actually constitute the four features of all metaphors. In other words, all human technologies whatever are, in the fullest sense, linguistic outerings, or utterings, of man. (p. 275)"

"Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama. (p. 275)"

"Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure but metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing in terms of another. (p. 298)"

"Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always preceed causes in the actual developmental order. (p. 303)"

"Great ages of innovation are the ages in which entire cultures are junked or scrapped. (p. 309)"

"I am a pattern watcher. (p. 311)"

"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. (p. 314)"

"The images of mankind have become the most basic thing about them. And they're all software, and disembodied. (p. 346)"

"The magic of the cave image lies in its being, not in its being seen. The symbolic does not refer. It is. (p. 350)"

"The mask, like the side-show freak, is mainly participatory rather than pictorial in its sensory appeal. (p. 352)"

"The new science of communication is percept, not concept. (p. 259)"

"The nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images. (p. 360)"

"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."