Marshall McLuhan Quotes - Page 15

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.

Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.

If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.

In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.

By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.

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.

At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.

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.

Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.

You see, Dad, Professor McLuhan says that the environment that man creates becomes his medium for defining his role in it. The invention of type created linear, or sequential thought, separating thought from action. Now, with TV and folk singing, thought and action are closer and social involvement is greater. We again live in a village. Get it?

The genteel is a mighty catafalque of service-with-a-smile and flattering solicitude smothering every spontaneous movement of thought or feeling.

... Their power to see environments as they really are.

One matter Englishmen don't think in the least funny is their happy consciousness of possessing a deep sense of humor.

The hallucinogenic world, in environmental terms, can be considered as a forlorn effort of man to match the speed of power of hisextended nervous system (which we call the "electronic world") by intensifying the activity of his inner nervous system.

The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive.

Erwin Schrodinger has explained how he and his fellow physicists had agreed that they would report their new discoveries and experiments in quantum physics in the language of Newtonian physics. That is, they agreed to discuss and report the non-visual, electronic world in the language of the visual world of Newton.

The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.

Why is it so easy to acquire the solutions of past problems and so difficult to solve current ones

Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space.

Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he [Jimmy Carter] puts nostalgia in its place.

It is always the psychic and social grounds, brought into play by each medium or technology, that readjust the balance of the hemispheres and of human sensibilities into equilibrium with those grounds.

A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space.

Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology.

We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish.

In a cool medium, the audience is an active constituent of the viewing or listening experience. A girl wearing open-mesh silk stockings or glasses is inherently cool and sensual because the eye acts as a surrogate hand in filling in the low-definition image thus engendered. Which is why boys make passes at girls who wear glasses.