348 quotes
Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology. (p. 85)
Counterblast (1969)
The Concept of Dread, by Soren Kierkegaard, appeared in 1844, first year of the commercial telegraph...It mentions the telegraph as a reason for dread and nowness or existenz.
Culture Is Our Business (1970)
Visual space is the space of detachment. Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. (p. 194)
Culture Is Our Business (1970)
Chinese script is not visual but iconic and tactile. It does not disturb the tribal bonds. (p. 72)
Culture Is Our Business (1970)
There are no connections in resonant space. There are only interfaces and metamorphoses. (p. 75)
The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011)
Our book technology has Gutenberg at one end and the Ford assembly lines at the other. Both are obsolete. (p. 99)
Counterblast (1969)
The images of mankind have become the most basic thing about them. And they're all software, and disembodied. (p. 346)
The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011)
The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message. (p. 8)
Understanding Media (1964)
The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb. (p. 55)
Counterblast (1969)
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)
Counterblast (1969)
The metropolis today is a classroom; the ads are its teachers. The traditional classroom is an obsolete detention home, a feudal dungeon. (p. 12)
Counterblast (1969)
One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information system. (p. 298)
Understanding Media (1964)
Sheer visual quantity evokes the magical resonance of the tribal hoard. The box office looms as a return to the echo chamber of bardic incantation. (p. 288)
The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)
Paradox is the technique for seizing the conflicting aspects of any problem. Paradox coalesces or telescopes various facets of a complex process in a single instant. (p. 106)
Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972)
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]
The Medium is the Massage (1967)
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)
The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)
Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement. (p. 113)
Understanding Media (1964)
We now live in a technologically prepared environment that blankets the earth itself. The humanly contrived environment of electric information and power has begun to take precedence over the old environment of "nature." Nature, as it were, begins to be the content of our technology.
A McLuhan Sourcebook (1995)
The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community.
The Greeks encountered the confusion of tongues when numbers invaded Euclidean space. (p. 203)
The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)