Quotes About McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan was right when he said that television has made a global village of the world—but he didn't know the global village would be Beirut.

Of the many unforeseen consequences of typography, the emergence of nationalism is, perhaps, the most familiar

The logos of creation, 'And God Said ...' formed the basis of Christian interpretation of the 'Book of Nature.

One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with.

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

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

The job of art is not to store moments of experience but to explore environments that are otherwise invisible. Art is not a retrieval system of precious moments of past cultures. Art has a live, ongoing function. McLuhan CD-ROM

World War 3 is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.

Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment—of what's really going on—affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions.

Noted by McLuhan, "The portability of the book, like that of the easel-painting, added much to the cult of individualism.

Psychosis, it seemed to some, was in the air. One unhappy host played Phil a copy of Marshall McLuhan's 1968 LP The Medium is the Massage, an audio collage inspired by the resonating global echo chamber that McLuhan believed formed a new electronic form of "acoustic space." When the recording began, Dick clapped his hands over his ears and screamed, "Turn it off! Turn it off! It sounds like the inside of my head when I go mad and have to go the hospital.

But, for the so-called apocalyptics, McLuhan's conviction was translated into a tragic consequence: Liberated from the contents of communication, the addressee of the messages of the mass media receives only a global ideological lesson, the call to narcotic passiveness. When the mass media triumph, the human being dies.

When McLuhan announced that the medium was the message, he was being arch. The medium is both opposite to, and entwined with, the message.)

Education, which should be helping youth to understand and adapt to their revolutionary new environments, is instead being used merely as an instrument of cultural aggression.

Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.

In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.

McLuhan believed that preliterate peoples must have enjoyed a particularly intense "sensuous involvement" with the world. When we learned to read, he argued, we suffered a "considerable detachment from the feelings or emotional involvement that a nonliterate man or society would experience.