Marshall McLuhan: Trending quotes (page 21)

“Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.”

“The audience, as ground, shapes and controls the work of art.”

“The potential of any new technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors.”

“Non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training.”

“Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.”

“Literacy, in translating man out of the closed world of tribal depth and resonance, gave man an eye for an ear and ushered him into a visual open world of specialized and divided consciousness.”

“PLAYBOY: A Columbia coed was recently quoted in Newsweek as equating you and LSD. “LSD doesn’t mean anything until you consume it,” she said. “Likewise McLuhan.” Do you see any similarities?
McLUHAN: I’m flattered to hear my work described as hallucinogenic, but I suspect that some of my academic critics find me a bad trip.”

“Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.”

“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.”

“The user of the electric light -- or a hammer, or a language, or a book -- is the content. As such, there is a total metamorphosis of the user by the interface. It is the metamorphosis that I consider the message.”

“The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message.”

“Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses.”

“The levelling of inflexion and of wordplay became part of the program of applied knowledge in the seventeenth century.”

“Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind.”

“I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.”