Quotes from TEIAB

This is the Quotes From TEIAB category.

Quotes from “The Electric Information Age Book”. The book explores Jerome Agel’s ‘inventory books’ with special focus on the first edition: “The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects” by Quentin Fiore and Marshall McLuhan. More information via Inventory Press.

“©”

“{The book} is an extension of the eye…”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 368

“”Authorship”—in the sense we know it today, individual intellectual effort related to the book as an economic commodity—was practically unknown before the advent of print technology. Medieval scholars were indifferent to the precise identity of the “books” they studied. In turn, they rarely signed even what was clearly their own. They were a humble service organization. Procuring texts was often a very tedious and time-consuming task. Many small texts were transmitted into volumes of miscellaneous content, very much like “jottings” in a scrapbook, and, in this transmission, authorship was often lost.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. Mechanical multiples of the same text created a public—a reading public. The rising consumer-oriented culture became concerned with labels of authenticity and protection against theft and piracy. The idea of copyright—”the exclusive right to reproduce, publish, and sell the matter and form of a literary or artistic work”—was born.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Xerography—every man’s brain-picker—heralds the times of instant publishing. Anybody can now become both author and publisher. Take any books on any subject and custom-make your own book by simply xeroxing a chapter from this one, a chapter from that one—instant steal!”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 9

“{As [the] new [electric] technologies come into play, people are less and less convinced of the importance of self-expression.} Teamwork succeeds private effort.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“A ditto, ditto device”

“Wars, revolutions, civil uprisings are interfaces within the new environments created by electric informational media.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasing old categories—[for looking ahead,] for probing around”

— Marshall McLuhan

“{Growing up—that is our new work, and it is total.} [Mere instruction will not suffice.]”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Address at Vision 65” , p. 4

“{The method of our time is to use not single but multiple models for [experimental] exploration—the technique of the suspended judgment} [is the discovery of the twentieth century as the technique of invention was the discovery of the nineteenth.]”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 71

“I wouldn’t be seen dead with a living work of art.”

— Museum Curator

“Good Morning!”

““{And} who are you?” [said the Caterpillar.]”

— Lewis Carroll, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”

“and how!”

“It is the business of the future to be dangerous.”

— A.N. Whitehead, “Science and the Modern World”

“There is [absolutely] no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”

— John Culkin, “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan” (The Saturday Review)

“When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively apposed, put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“How much do you make? Have you ever contemplated suicide?”

— narrator

“Are you now or have you ever been… ? {Are you aware of the fact…? I have here before me….}”

— narrator

“you”