Marshall McLuhan: Man

“The literate man is a sucker for propaganda... You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas.”

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot… for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.”

“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)”

“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.”

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

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

“The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature…The new media are not ways of relating us to the old world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.”

“For the oral man the literal text contains all possible levels of meaning.”

“Literate man, civilized man, tends to restrict and to separate functions, whereas tribal man has freely extended the form of his body to include the universe. (p. 117)”

“Every technology contrived and “outered” by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization.”

“Perhaps the most precious possession of man is his abiding awareness of the Analogy of Proper Proportionality, the key to all metaphysical insight, and perhaps the very condition of consciousness itself. This analogical awareness is constituted of a perpetual play of ratios among ratios. A is to B, what C is to D, which is to say the ratio between A and B, is proportionable to the ratio between C and D, there being a ratio between these ratios, as well, this lively awareness of the most exquisite delicacy depends upon there being no connection whatsoever between the components. If A were linked to B, or C to D, mere logic would take the place of analogical perception, thus one of the penalties paid for literacy and a high visual culture is a strong tendency to encounter all things through a rigorous storyline, as it were. Paradoxically, connected spaces and situations exclude participation, whereas discontinuity affords room for involvement. Visual space is connected and creates detachment or non-involvement. It also tends to exclude the participation of the other senses.”

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

“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.”

“Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.”

“Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.”

“All media of communications are cliches serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns of associations and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness.”

“The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world.”

“Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world.”

“In Chinese, honesty is the figure of a man standing, physically standing, beside his work. That means honesty: a man stands by his work. Two things: figure / ground.”