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Quotes from Counterblast — Marshall McLuhan

1911–1980 Canada

← All quotes by Marshall McLuhan

24 quotes

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

Counterblast (1969)

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)

Counterblast (1969)

The comic strip: upholder of Homeric culture. (p.19)

Counterblast (1969)

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

Counterblast (1969)

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

Counterblast (1969)

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

Counterblast (1969)

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

Counterblast (1969)

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

Counterblast (1969)

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

Counterblast (1969)

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

Counterblast (1969)

Environment is process, not container. (p. 30)

Counterblast (1969)

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

Counterblast (1969)

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

Counterblast (1969)

The city no longer exists except as a cultural ghost for tourists. Any highway eatery with its TV set, newspaper and magazine is as cosmopolitan as New York or Paris. (p.12)

Counterblast (1969)

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)

Counterblast (1969)

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

Counterblast (1969)

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

Counterblast (1969)

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)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Marshall McLuhan (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.