Marshall McLuhan: Trending quotes (page 4)

“Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode – a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 62

“The Gutenberg galaxy was theoretically dissolved in 1905 with the discovery of curved space, but in practice it had been invaded by the telegraph two generations before that.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 286

“Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. (p.46)”

Marshall McLuhan book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Understanding Media (1964)

Love , World , Sex , Bee

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

Marshall McLuhan

Source: Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 217

God , Books , Nature

“Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.”

Marshall McLuhan

American scholar, Volume 35, 1965, p. 200
1960s

Change

“Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 183

“Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 132

“The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication…is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts.”

Marshall McLuhan

Letter to Harold Adam Innis (14 March 1951), published in Essential McLuhan (1995), edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, p. 73
1950s

Art , Feeling , Communication , Business

“As Narcissus fell in love with an outering (projection, extension) of himself, man seems invariably to fall in love with the newest gadget or gimmick that is merely an extension of his own body.”

Marshall McLuhan

1990s and beyond, "The Agenbite of Outwit" (1998)

Love

“Q: Why is America the land of the overrated child and the underrated adult? Q: How can children grow up in a world in which adults idolize youthfulness? Q: What happens when the ad makers taker over all the popular myths and poetry?”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 141

Children , Youth , World

“The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 14

Nature

“The message of radio is one of violent, unified implosion and resonance.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 263

“The images of mankind have become the most basic thing about them. And they're all software, and disembodied.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 346

“New media are new languages, their grammar and syntax yet unknown.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 229

“People in new environments always produce the new preceptual modality without any difficulty or awareness of change. It is later that the psychic and social realignments baffle societies.”

Marshall McLuhan

ARTnews annual, Volume 31, Art Foundation, 1966, p. 56
1960s

People , Change

“Man in the electronic age has no possible environment except the globe and no possible occupation except information-gathering.”

Marshall McLuhan

1990s and beyond, "The Agenbite of Outwit" (1998)

Age

“Each tetrad gives the etymology of its subject, as an uttering or outering of the body physical or mental, and provides its anatomy in fourfold exegetical manner.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 224

“The invention of typography confirmed and extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly repeatable “commodity,” the first assembly-line, and the first mass-production.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 142

Knowledge

“McLuhan after his September 1979 stroke. Brand, Stewart. "McLuhan's last words." New Scientist, 29 Jan 1981.”

Marshall McLuhan

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1980s

“King Lear is a working model of the process of denudation by which men translate themselves from a world of roles to a world of jobs.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 16

Men , World