Marshall McLuhan Quotes - Page 11

I am not a "culture critic" because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world.

Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.

The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.

To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.

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.

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 past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.

Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay.

Current illusion is that science has abolished all natural laws.

When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.

I am curious to know what would happen if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties.

Information and images bump against each other every day in massive quantities, and the resonance of this interfacing is like the babble of a village or tavern gossip session.

The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived with the figure minus ground.

The meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience. The content of new situations, both private and corporate, is typically the preceding situation.

North Americans have a peculiar bias. They go outside to be alone and they go home to be social.

The movie, by sheer speeding up of the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configurations and structure.

Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.

Explore the situation. Statements are expendable. Don't keep on looking in the rearview mirror and defending the status quo which is outmoded the moment it happened.

In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.

Ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure.

The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.

Since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly interrelating every human experience.

Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.

A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.

Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to loose.