Marshall McLuhan

"By simply moving information and brushing information against information, any medium whatever creates vast wealth."

"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."

"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)"

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

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

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

"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)"

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

"America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy — the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the USA."

"Poetry and the arts can’t exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind."

"There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation."

"The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action."

"The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication...is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts."

"Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world."

"Human perception is literally incarnation."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"The mother tongue is propaganda."

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Language is a form of organized stutter."

"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."

"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)"

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

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

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

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

"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)"

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

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