All Quotes

"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."

"In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. (p. 125)"

"Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog. (p. 48)"

"We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future."

"The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the ground rules of the environment. The ground rules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serves as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. (p. 93)"

"All media are extensions of some human faculty -- psychic or physical."

"There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening. [A chapter sub-heading attributed by McLuhan to Alfred North Whitehead]"

"Art is whatever you can get away with."

"It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education & entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter."

"When we invent a new technology, we become cannibals. We eat ourselves alive since these technologies are merely extensions of ourselves. The new environment shaped by electric technology is a cannibalistic one that eats people. To survive one must study the habits of cannibals. (p. 261)"

"I don't explain—I explore."

"Casting my perils before swains."

"Perhaps the most precious possession of man is his abiding awareness of the Analogy of Proper Proportionality, the key to all metaphysical insight, and perhaps the very condition of consciousness itself. This analogical awareness is constituted of a perpetual play of ratios among ratios. A is to B, what C is to D, which is to say the ratio between A and B, is proportionable to the ratio between C and D, there being a ratio between these ratios, as well, this lively awareness of the most exquisite delicacy depends upon there being no connection whatsoever between the components. If A were linked to B, or C to D, mere logic would take the place of analogical perception, thus one of the penalties paid for literacy and a high visual culture is a strong tendency to encounter all things through a rigorous storyline, as it were. Paradoxically, connected spaces and situations exclude participation, whereas discontinuity affords room for involvement. Visual space is connected and creates detachment or non-involvement. It also tends to exclude the participation of the other senses. (p.240)"

"Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture."

"Headlines are icons, not literature. (p. 5)"

"The metropolis today is a classroom; the ads are its teachers. The traditional classroom is an obsolete detention home, a feudal dungeon. (p. 12)"

"Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog. (p. 13)"

"By surpassing writing, we have regained our wholeness, not on a national or cultural but cosmic plane."

"The stock market was created by the telegraph and the telephone, and its panics are engineered by carefully orchestrated stories in the press. (p. 106)"

"Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space...it is a cosmic, invisible architecture of the human dark. (p. 13)"

"Writing turned a spotlight on the high, dim Sierras of speech; writing was the visualization of acoustic space. It lit up the dark. (p. 14)"

"The Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings. (p. 14)"

"The potential of any new technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors. (p. 210)"

"The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature. (p. 14)"

"Gutenberg made all history available as classified data: the transportable book brought the world of the dead into the space of the gentlemen's library; the telegraph brought the entire world of the living to the workman's breakfast table. (p. 15)"

"We begin again to structure the primordial feelings...from which 3000 years of literacy divorced us. We begin again to live a myth. (p. 17)"

"Bless advertising art for its pictorial vitality and verbal creativity. (p. 18)"

"Each new technology is a reprogramming of sensory life. (p. 33)"

"To the blind all things are sudden. (p. 41)"

"The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb. (p. 55)"

"People never remember but the computer never forgets. (p. 69)"

"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. (p. 84)"

"Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology. (p. 85)"

"Our book technology has Gutenberg at one end and the Ford assembly lines at the other. Both are obsolete. (p. 99)"

"Bless Madison Ave for restoring the magical art of the cavemen to suburbia. (p. 130)"

"Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition. (p. 132)"

"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?"

"Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today."

"Unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitutes a total and near-instanteous transformation of culture, values and attitudes."

"I neither approve nor disapprove. I merely try to understand. Sexual freedom is as natural to newly tribalized youth as drugs."

"The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it’s the universal experience of TV watchers."

"Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness...This is a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man."

"I've always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened."

"In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession."

"The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on."

"The user of the electric light -- or a hammer, or a language, or a book -- is the content. As such, there is a total metamorphosis of the user by the interface. It is the metamorphosis that I consider the message."

"After childhood, the senses specialize via the channels of dominant technologies and social weaponries."

"My method is vertical rather than horizontal so the scenery does not change but the texture does."

"Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance."