Marshall McLuhan: Trending quotes (page 7)

“War has become the environment of our time if only because it is an accelerated form of innovation and education.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 381

War , Education , Time

“The automated presidential surrogate is the superlative nobody.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 157

“Cultural dominance by either the left or the right hemisphere is largely dependent upon environmental factors.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 72

Dependency

“All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 178-179

Change , Personality

“The typographic logic created “the outsider,” the alienated mass, as the type of integral, that is, intuitive and irrational, man.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 241

“The dyslexic: Everyman as cubist.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 76

“One of the things that happens at the speed of light is that people lose their goals in life. So what takes the place of goals and objectives? Well, role-playing is coming in very fast.”

Marshall McLuhan

Interview between Californian Governor Jerry Brown and Marshall McLuhan, 1977
1970s

Life , People , Light , Speed

“Interdeterminacy was a figure-ground problem arising from incongruity between the visual bias of classical science and the new acoustic sensibilities.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 44

Problem , Science

“The Eskimo, like any pre-literate, leaps easily from the Paleolithic stone age to the electric age, by-passing the Neolithic specialism.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

Age

“The new science of communication is percept, not concept.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 259

Communication , Science

“Every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 171

“By surpassing writing, we have regained our wholeness, not on a national or cultural but cosmic plane.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Counterblast (1969)

“We are numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 16

“Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness…This is a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Playboy Interview (1969)

Men , Communication , Universe , Christ

“Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village size and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumour, and personal malice.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 24

World , Personality , Speed

“Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 136

Men

“The nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 360

“In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 4

Age

“The mosaic form of the TV image demands participation and involvement in depth, of the whole being, as does the sense of touch.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 334

Sense

“We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation.”

Marshall McLuhan

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1960s, Understanding Media (1964)

World