Quotes from the book

This is the Quotes From The Book category.

Quotes from the book “The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects” by media analyst Marshall McLuhan and graphic designer Quentin Fiore, and coordinated by Jerome Agel. It was published in March 1967 and became a bestseller with a cult following. More info via Wikipedia.

“Good Morning!”

“The
Medium
Is the
Massage.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[You mean, like]
… the massage?”

— Sam Zacks

“and how!”

“The major advances of civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.”

— A.N. Whitehead, “Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect”

“The medium, or process, of our time—electric technology—is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and reevaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“{Everything is changing—you,} your family, your neighborhood, your education, your job, your government {, your relation to “the others”. And they’re changing dramatically.}”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The alphabet, for instance, is a technology that is absorbed by the very young child in a completely unconscious manner, by osmosis so to speak. Words and the meaning of words predispose the child to think and act automatically in certain ways.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The alphabet and print technology [printing] extended the emphasis upon lineality. It fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment. [A habit of thinking in bits and parts, and step by step.]”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 42

“The older training of observation has become quite irrelevant in this new time, because it is based on psychological responses and concepts conditioned by the former technology—mechanization.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Innumerable confusion and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions, such as our own. Our “Age of Anxiety” is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools—with yesterday’s concepts. [With yesterday’s ideals.]”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 274

“Youth instinctively understands the present environment—the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth. This is the reason for the great alienation between generations.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.”

— A. N. Whitehead, “Adventures in Ideas”

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“Learning, the educational process, has long been associated only with the glum.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We speak of the “serious” student. Our time presents a unique opportunity for learning by means of humor—a perceptive or incisive joke can be more meaningful than platitudes lying between two covers.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The Medium is the Massage is a look-around to see what’s happening. It is a collide-oscope of interfaced situations.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Students of media are persistently attacked as evaders, idly concentrating on means or processes rather than on “substance.” The dramatic and rapid changes of “substance” elude these accusers.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Survival is not possible if one approaches his environment, the social drama, with a fixed, unchangeable point of view—the witless repetitive response to the unperceived.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“you”

“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

“Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community’s need to know.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions—the patterns of mechanistic technologies—are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier—that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early mistakes.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We have already reached a point where remedial control, born out of knowledge of media and their total effects on all of us, must be exerted.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“How shall the new environment be programmed now that we have become so involved with each other, now that all of us have become the unwitting work force for social change?”

— Marshall McLuhan

“What’s that buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz[ing]?”

— narrator

“The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by electric media—movies, Telstar, flight—far surpasses any possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Now all the world’s a sage.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of “time” and “space” and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men. It has reconstituted dialogue on a global scale. Its message is Total Change, ending psychic, social, economic, and political parochialism.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The old civic, state, and national groupings have become unworkable.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Nothing can be further from the spirit of the new technology than “a place for everything and everything in its place.” You can’t go home again.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“There is a world of difference between the modern home environment of integrated electric information and the classroom.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Today’s television child is attuned to up-to-the-minute “adult” news—inflation, rioting, war, taxes, crime, bathing beauties—and is bewildered when he enters the nineteenth century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules. It is naturally an environment much like any factory set-up with its inventories and assembly lines.”

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

“The “child” was an invention of the seventeenth century; he did not exist in, say, Shakespeare’s day. He had, up until that time, been merged in the adult world and there was nothing that could be called childhood in our sense.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Today’s child is growing up absurd, because it lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up.”

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

“{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

“When this circuit learns your job, what are you going to do?”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Jobs represent a relatively recent pattern of work organization. From the fifteenth century to the twentieth century, there is a steady progress of fragmentation of the stages of work that constitute mechanization and specialism. These procedures cannot serve for survival or sanity in this new time.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Under conditions of electric circuitry, all the fragmented job patterns tend to blend once more into involving and demanding roles or forms of work that more and more resemble teaching, learning, and “human” service, in the older sense of dedicated loyalty.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Unhappily, many well-intentioned political reform programs that aim at the alleviation of suffering caused by unemployment betray an ignorance of the true nature of media-influence.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“”Come into my parlor,” said the computer to the specialist.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Nose-counting, a cherished part of the eighteenth-century fragmentation process, has rapidly become a cumbersome and ineffectual form of social assessment in an environment of instant electric speeds. The public, in the sense of a great consensus of separate and distinct viewpoints, is finished.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Today, the mass audience (the successor to the “public”) can be used as a creative, participating force. It is, instead, merely given packages of passive entertainment.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“A new form of “politics” is emerging, and in ways we haven’t yet noticed. The living room has become a voting booth. Participation via television in Freedom Marches, in war, revolution, pollution, and other events is changing everything.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The shock of recognition!”

— Marshall McLuhan

“In an electric information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained—ignored. Too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“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)

“All media [—or technologies—] work us over completely. They are so pervasive [—permeating throughout—] in their personal, political, [economic, aesthetic,] psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences, that they leave no part of us untouched [, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage].”

— Marshall McLuhan

“All
media
are
extensions
of
some
human
faculty—
psychic [/mental]
or
physical.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The wheel …is an extension of the foot.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 46

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

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

“Clothing, [is] an extension of the skin…”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 129

“Electric circuitry, [the medium of our time, is] an extension of the central nervous system.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 3

“[Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions.] The extension of any one sense [displaces the other senses and] alters the way we think and act—the way we perceive the world. [The way we perceive our own bodies.]”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 69

“When
these
ratios
change,
men change.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 9 and “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 98

“Now for the evidence,” said the King, “and then the sentence”. “No!” said the Queen, “first the sentence, and then the evidence!” “Nonsense!” cried Alice, so loudly that everybody jumped, “the idea of having the sentence first!”

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

“The dominant organ of sensory and social orientation in pre-alphabet societies was the ear—hearing was believing. The phonetic alphabet forced the magic world of the ear to yield to the neutral world of the eye.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Man was given an eye for an ear.”

— Marshall McLuhan, “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 26

“Western history was shaped for some three thousand years by the introduction of the phonetic alephbet, a medium that depends solely on the eye for comprehension.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The alphabet is a construct of fragmented bits and parts which have no semantic meaning in themselves, and which must be strung together in a line, bead-like, and in a prescribed order. Its use fostered and encouraged the habit of perceiving all environment in visual and spatial terms—particularly in terms of a space and of a time that are uniform, c,o,n,t,i,n,u,o,u,s and c-o-n-n-e-c-t-e-d.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The line, the [/that good old reliable] continuum

—this sentence is a prime example—

became the organizing principle of life.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“As we begin, so shall we go.”

“The eye—it cannot choose but see; we cannot bid the ear be still; our bodies feel, where’er they be, against or with our will.”

— William Wordsworth, “Expostulation and Reply”

“Rationality” and logic came to depend on the presentation of connected and sequential facts or concepts. For many people rationality still has the connotation of uniformity and connectiveness. “I don’t follow you” means “I don’t think what you’re saying is rational.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Visual space is uniform, continuous, and connected. The rational man in our Western culture is a visual man. The fact that most conscious experience has little “visuality” in it is lost on him.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Rationality and visuality have long been interchangeable terms, but we do not live in a primarily visual world any more.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The fragmenting of activities, our habit of thinking in bits and parts—”specialism”—reflected the step-by-step linear departmentalizing process inherent in the technology of the alphabet.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Until WRITING was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion {, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog}.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Counterblast” (1954)

“The goose’s quill put an end to talk. It abolished mystery; it gave architecture and towns; it brought roads and armies, bureaucracy. It was the basic metaphor with which the cycle of CIVILIZATION began, the step from the dark into the light of the mind. The hand that filled the parchment page built a city.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Counterblast” (1954)

“Whence did the wond’rous mystic art arise, Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes? That we by tracing magic lines are taught, How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?”

— translation of Brébeuf’s verse translation of Lucan’s “Pharsalia” in “The Origin and Progress of Writing” by Thomas Astle

“Printing {, a ditto device}”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan, “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 124

“[Printing] created the portable book, which men could read in privacy and in isolation from others. Man could now inspire—and conspire.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Like easel painting, the printed book added much to the new cult of individualism. The private, fixed point of view became possible and literacy conferred the power of detachment, of non-involvement.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The Renaissance Legacy.
The Vanishing Point = Self-Effacement,
The Detached Observer.
No Involvement!”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The viewer of Renaissance art is systematically placed outside the frame of experience. A piazza for everything and everything in its piazza.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all of us, al att once. No detachment or frame is possible.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Compartmentalization of occupations and interests bring about a seperation of that mode of activity commonly called ‘practice’ from insight, of imagination from executive ‘doing’.”

— John Dewey, “Art as Experience”

“Art, or the graphic transition of a culture, is shaped by the way space is perceived. Since the Renaissance the Western artist perceived his environment primarily in terms of the visual. Everything was dominated by the eye of the beholder. His conception of space was in terms of a perspective projection upon a plane surface consisting of formal units of spatial measurement. he accepted the dominance of the vertical and the horizontal—of symmetry—as an absolute condition of order. This view is deeply embedded in the consciousness of Western art.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Primitive, and pre-alphabet people integrate time and space as one and live in an acoustic, horizonless, boundless, olfactory space, rather than in visual space. Their graphic presentation is like an x-ray. They put in everything they know, rather than only what they see. A drawing of a man hunting seal on an ice floe will show not only what is on top of the ice, but what lies underneath as well. The primitive artist twists and tilts the various possible visual aspects until they fully explain what he wishes to represent.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“(Carl Orff, the noted contemporary German composer, has refused to accept as a student any but the pre-school child whose spontaneous sense perceptions have not yet been channeled by formal, literary, visual prejudices.)”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 40

“Electric circuitry is recreating in us the multi-dimensional space orientation of the “primitive”.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“A cell for citters to cit in.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The idea of detention in a closed space as a form of human punitive corrective action seems to have come in very much in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—at the time perspective and pictorial space was developing in our Western world. The whole concept of enclosure as a means of constraint and as a means of classifying doesn’t work as well in our electronic world.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The new feeling that people have about guilt is not something that can be privately assigned to some individual, but is, rather, something shared by everybody, in some mysterious way.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 40

“This feeling [of guilt] seems to be returning to our midst. In tribal societies we are told that it is a familiar reaction, when some hideous event occurs, for some people to say, “How horrible it must be to feel like that,” instead of blaming somebody for having done something horrible. This feeling is an aspect of the new mass culture we are moving into—a world of total involvement in which everybody is so profoundly involved with everybody else and in which nobody can really imagine what private guilt can be anymore.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 52

“Ours is a brand-new world of all-at-onceness.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“”Time” [in a sense] has ceased, “space” has vanished. [Like primitives,] we now live in a global village [of our own making]—a simultaneous happening.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We are back in acoustic space. {We have begun again to structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us.}”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Counterblast” (1954)

“We have had to shift our stress of attention from action to reaction. We must now know in advance the consequences of any policy or action, since the results are experienced without delay. Because of electric speed, we can no longer wait and see.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 387

“[George Washington once remarked,] “We haven’t heard from Benjamin Franklin in Paris this year. We should write him a letter.””

— George Washington

“At the high speeds of electric communication, purely visual means of apprehending the world are no longer possible; they are just too slow to be relevant or effective.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Unhappily, we confront this new situation with an enormous backlog of outdated mental and psychological responses.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The new electric drama has left us d-a-n-g-l-i-n-g. Our most impressive words and thoughts betray us—they refer us only to the past, not to the present.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[The medium of our time,] electric circuitry, profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.”

— Marshall McLuhan, “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 31

“We have now become aware of the possibility of arranging the entire human environment as a work of art, as a teaching machine designed to maximize perception and to make everyday learning a process of discovery. Application of this knowledge would be the equivalent of a thermostat controlling room temperature. It would seem only reasonable to extend such controls to all the sensory thresholds of our being. We have no reason to be grateful to those who juggle these thresholds in the name of haphazard innovation.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“An astronomer looking through a 200-inch telescope exclaimed that it was going to rain. His assistant asked, “How can you tell?” “Because my corns hurt.””

— Marshall McLuhan

“Environments [are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which] are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 8

“Antienvironments, or countersituations made by artists, provide means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly. The interplay between the old and the new environments creates many problems and confusions.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 6 and 7

“The main obstacle to a clear understanding of the effects of the new media is our deeply embedded habit of regarding all phenomena from a fixed point of view. We speak, for instance, of “gaining perspective.” This psychological process derives unconsciously from print technology.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Print technology created the public. Electric technology created the mass.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 12

“The public consists of separate individuals walking around with separate, fixed points of view. The new [electric] technology demands that we abandon the luxury of this posture, this fragmentary outlook.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 12

“{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

“It isn’t that I don’t like current events. There have just been so many of them lately.”

— Robert J. Day, drawing in “The New Yorker”

“The end of the line.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The railway radically altered the personal outlooks and patterns of social interdependence. It bred and nurtured the American Dream.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[The railroad] created totally new urban, social, and family worlds. New ways of work. New ways of management. New legislation.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The technology of the railway created the myth of a green pasture world of innocence. It satisfied man’s desire to withdraw from society, symbolized by the city, to a rural setting where he could recover his animal and natural self. It was the pastoral ideal, a Jeffersonian world, an agrarian democracy which was intended to serve as a guide to social policy.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[The railway] gave us darkest suburbia and its lasting symbol: the lawnmower.”

— narrator

“The circuited city of the future will not be the huge hunk of concentrated real estate created by the railway. It will take on a totally new meaning under conditions of very rapid [transit and communication—] movement.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 13

“[The circuited city of the future] will be an information megalopolis. What remains of the configuration of former “cities” will be very much like World’s Fairs—places in which to show off new technology, not places of work or residence. They will be preserved, museumlike, as living monuments to the railway era. If we were to dispose of the city now, future societies would reconstruct them, like so-many Williamsburgs.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 13

“The past went thataway.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Suburbia [the suburban world of our time] lives [imaginatively] in Bonanza-land.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“When information is brushed against information… {the results are startling and effective.}”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The perennial quest [—search—] for involvement, fill-in, takes many forms.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[There are detracting voices who cry out:] “The stars are so big,
The Earth is so small,
Stay as you are.” [But can we afford to?]”

— second-grader, quoted in “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man” by Marshall McLuhan

“[In the name of “progress”,] our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Counterblast” (1954)

“Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 8

“The poet, the artist, the sleuth—whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely “well adjusted,” he cannot go along with currents and trends.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 7

“A strange bond often exists among anti-social types in their power to see environments as they really are.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“This need to interface, to confront environments with a certain antisocial power, is manifest in the famous story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” “Well-adjusted” courtiers, having vested interests, saw the Emperor as beautifully appointed. The “antisocial” brat, unaccustomed to the old environment, clearly saw that the Emperor “ain’t got nothin’ on.” The new environment was clearly visible to him.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Sneed Martin, Larson E. Whipsnade, Chester Snavely, A. Pismo Clam, J. P. Pinkerton Snoopington, Mahatma Kane Jeeves—he was always the man on the flying trapeze. On the stage, on the silver screen, all through his life, he swung between the ridiculous and the sublime, using humor as a probe.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment—of what’s really going on—affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions. Older societies thrived on purely literary plots. They demanded story lines. Today’s humor, on the contrary, has no story line—no sequence. It is usually a compressed overlay of stories.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“amateur”

“My education was of the most ordinary description, consisting of little more than the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic at a common day school. My hours out of school were passed at home and in the streets.”

— Michael Faraday, quoted in “The Life and Letters of Faraday” by Bence Jones

“Michael Faraday, who had little mathematics and no formal schooling beyond the primary grades, is celebrated as an experimenter who discovered the induction of electricity. He was one of the great founders of modern physics. It is generally acknowledged that Faraday’s ignorance of mathematics contributed to his inspiration, that it compelled him to develop a simple, nonmathematical concept when he looked for an explanation of his electrical and magnetic phenomena. Faraday had two qualities that more than made up for his lack of education: fantastic intuition and independence and originality of mind.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly and unaware.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The “expert” is the man who stays put.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[Robert Oppenheimer was fond of saying:] There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoted by Marshall McLuhan in “Address at Vision 65”, p. 12

“These are difficult times, because we are witnessing a clash of cataclysmic proportions between of two great technologies [the print technology of yesterday and the electric technology of today].”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We approach the new with the psychological conditioning and sensory responses of the old.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The clash [between two great technologies] naturally occurs in transitional periods. In late medieval art, for instance, we saw the fear of the new print technology expressed in the theme The Dancer of Death. Today, similar fears are expressed in the Theater of the Absurd.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Both [the print technology of yesterday and the electric technology of today] represent a common failure: the attempt to do a job demanded by the new environment with the tools of the old.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The thing of it is, we must live with the living.”

— Montaigne, “Of the Art of Conversation” (Book III, Ch. 8.)

“The youth of today are not permitted to approach the traditional heritage of mankind through the door of technological awareness. This only possible door for them is slammed in their faces by a rear-view-mirror society.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The young today live mythically and in depth. But they encounter instruction in situations organized by means of classified information—subjects are unrelated, they are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint. Many of our institutions suppress all the natural direct experience of youth, who respond with untaught delight to the poetry and the beauty of the new technological environment, the environment of popular culture. It could be their door to all past achievement if studied as an active (and not necessarily benign) force.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The student finds no means of involvement for himself and cannot discover how the educational scheme relates to his mythic world of electronically processed data and experience that his clear and direct responses report.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“It is a matter of the greatest urgency that our educational institutions realize that we now have civil war among these environments created by media other than the printed word.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The classroom is now in a vital struggle for survival with the immensely persuasive “outside” world created by new informational media.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Education must shift from instruction, from the imposing of stencils on brain pens, as it were, to discovery—to probing and exploration [and to the recognition of the language of forms].”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The young today reject goals. They want roles [—R-O-L-E-S. That is, total involvement. They do not want fragmented, specialized goals or jobs].”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We now experience simultaneously the dropout and the teach-in. The two forms are correlative. They belong together. The teach-in represents an attempt to shift education from instruction to discovery, from brainwashing students to brainwashing instructors. It is a big dramatic reversal. Vietnam, as the content of the teach-in, is a very small and perhaps misleading Red Herring. It really has little to do with the teach-in, as such, anymore than with the dropout.”

— Marshall McLuhan, “Address at Vision 65” , p. 11-12

“The dropout represents a rejection of nineteenth century technology as manifested in our educational establishments. The teach-in represents a creative effort, switching the educational process from package to discovery.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Address at Vision 65” , p. 12

“As the audience becomes a participant in the total electric drama, the classroom can become a scene in which the audience performs an enormous amount of work.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Address at Vision 65” , p. 12

“Because something is happening
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?”

— Bob Dylan, “Ballad Of A Thin Man”

“The hell of it is those punks pump over fifteen billion dollars into the economy every year.”

— Lorenz, drawing in “The New Yorker”

“History as she is harped.”

— Harry Levin, “James Joyce” (“The Atlantic” #178) and “Explorations” #8 by Marshall McLuhan

“The ear favors no particular “point of view.” We are enveloped by sound. It forms a seamless web around us. We say, “Music shall fill the air.” We never say, “Music shall fill a particular segment of the air.””

— Marshall McLuhan

“We hear sounds from everywhere, without ever having to focus. Sounds come from “above,” from “below,” from in “front” of us, from “behind” us, from our “right,” from our “left.” We can’t shut out sound automatically. We simply are not equipped with earlids.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[Where a visual space is an organized continuum of a uniformed connected kind,] the ear world [like the electric age] is a world of simultaneous relationships.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories [; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves … You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing].”

— Socrates, quoted in “Phaedrus” by Plato, see also “Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press”, p. 2

“Homer’s “Iliad” was the cultural encyclopedia of pre-literate Greece, the didactic vehicle that provided men with guidance for the management of their spiritual, ethical, and social lives. All the persuasive skills of the poetic and the dramatic idiom were marshaled to insure the faithful transmission of the tradition from generation to generation.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 3

“These Bardic songs were rhythmically organized with great formal mastery into metrical patterns which insured that everyone was psychologically attuned to memorization and to easy recall. There was no ear illiteracy in pre-literate Greece.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“In the “Republic,” Plato vigorously attacked the oral, poetized form as a vehicle for communicating knowledge. He pleaded for a more precise method of communication and classification (“The Ideas”), one which would favor the investigation of facts, principles of reality, human nature, and conduct. What the Greeks meant by “poetry” was radically different from what we mean by poetry. Their “poetic” expression was a product of a collective psyche and mind. The mimetic form, a technique that exploited rhythm, meter, and music, achieved the desired psychological response in the listener. Listeners could memorize with greater ease what was sung than what was said. Plato attacked this method because it discouraged disputation and argument. It was in his opinion the chief obstacle to abstract, speculative reasoning—he called it “a poison, and an enemy of the people.””

— Marshall McLuhan

“”Blind,” all-hearing Homer inherited this metaphorical mode of speech, a speech which, like a prism, refracts much meaning to a single point.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“”Precision” is sacrificed for a greater degree of suggestion. Myth is the mode of simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Electric circuitry confers a mythic dimension on our ordinary individual and group actions. Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Myth means putting on the audience, putting on one’s environment. The Beatles do this. They are a group of people who suddenly were able to put on their audience and the English language with musical effects—putting on a whole vesture, a whole time, a Zeit.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 11

“Young people are looking for a formula for putting on the universe—participation mystique. They do not look for detached patterns—for ways of relating themselves to the world, à la nineteenth century.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Develop A
Powerful
Memory?”

— advertisement by “Memory Studies”

“Most people find it difficult to understand purely verbal concepts. They suspect the ear; they don’t trust it. In general we feel more secure when things are visible, when we can “see for ourselves.” We admonish children, for instance, to “believe only half of what they see, and nothing of what they hear.” All kinds of “shorthand” systems of notation have been developed to help us see what we hear.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We employ visual and spatial metaphors for a great many everyday expressions. We insist on employing visual metaphors even when we refer to purely psychological states, such as tendency and duration. For instance, we say thereafter when we really mean thenafter, always when we mean at all times. We are so visually biased that we call our wisest men visionaries, or seers!”

— Marshall McLuhan

“{,.;:}?!{‘’-“”}”

“Reminders—(relics of the past)—in a world of the PRINTED word-efforts to introduce an AUDITORY dimension onto the visual organization of the PAGE: all effect information, RHYTHM, inflection, pauses. Until recent years, these EFFECTS were quite elaborate—they allowed for all sorts of CHANGES of type faces. The NEWSPAPER layout provides more variety of AUDITORY effects from typography than the ordinary book page does.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Speak that I may see you.”

— Marshall McLuhan, “Counterblast” (1954)

“Electrically-recorded voiceprints, like fingerprints, are now being accepted as evidence by some courts.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[O]ne must be disinterested […], accept that a sound is a sound and a man is a man, give up illusions about ideas of order, expressions of sentiment, and all the rest of our inherited aesthetic claptrap.”

— John Cage, “Silence: Lectures and Writings”

“The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all.”

— John Cage, “Silence: Lectures and Writings”

“This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation.”

— John Cage, “Silence: Lectures and Writings”

“Everyone has the best seat.”

— John Cage, “Silence: Lectures and Writings”

“[John Cage, a composer of new music, has stated:] “Everything we do is music.””

— John Cage, quoted by Calvin Tomkins in “The Bride and the Bachelors”

“Theatre takes place all the time, wherever one is. And art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case.”

— John Cage, “Silence: Lectures and Writings”

“They [I Ching] told me to continue what I was doing, and to spread JOY and revolution.”

— John Cage, quoted by Calvin Tomkins in “The Bride and the Bachelors”

“Listening to the simultaneous messages of Dublin, James Joyce released the greatest flood of oral linguistic music that was ever manipulated into art.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The prouts who will invent a writing there ultimately is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the raiding there originally. That’s the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso many counterpoint words. What can’t be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for. Now, the doctrine obtains, we have occasioning cause causing effects and affects occasionally recausing altereffects.”

— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”

“Joyce is, in the Wake, making his own Altamira cave drawings of the entire history of the human mind, in terms of its basic gestures and postures during all the phases of human culture and technology. As his title indicates, he saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but if again, then let’s make it a wake or awake or both. Joyce could see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle as in a trance or dream. He discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 7

“©”

“”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”

“Even so imaginative a writer as Jules Verne failed to envisage the speed with which electric technology would produce informational media. He rashly predicted that television would be invented in the XXIXth Century.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Science-fiction writing today presents situations that enable us to perceive the potential of new technologies. Formerly, the problem was to invent new forms of labor-saving. Today, the reverse is the problem. Now we have to adjust, not to invent. We have to find the environments in which it will be possible to live with our new inventions. Big Business has learned to tap the s-f writer.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Television completes the cycle of the human sensorium. With the omnipresent ear and the moving eye, we have abolished writing, the specialized acoustic-visual metaphor that established the dynamics of Western civilization.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“In television there occurs an extension of the sense of active, exploratory touch which involves all the senses simultaneously, rather than that of sight alone. You have to be “with” it. But in all electric phenomena, the visual is only one component in a complex interplay. Since, in the age of information, most transactions are managed electrically, the electric technology has meant for Western man a considerable drop in the visual component, in his experience, and a corresponding increase in the activity of his other senses.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Television demands participation and involvement in depth of the whole being.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[Television] will not work as a background. It engages you. Perhaps this is why so many people feel that their identity has been threatened. This charge of the light brigade has heightened our general awareness of the shape and meaning of lives and events to a level of extreme sensitivity.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“It was the funeral of President Kennedy that most strongly proved the power of television [—to draw everyone into mass participation—] to invest an occasion with the character of corporate participation. It involves an entire population in a ritual process. [The entire nation and world were simultaneously united in a single emotion and involvement.]”

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

“(By comparison, press, movies, and radio are mere packaging devices for consumers.)”

— Marshall McLuhan

“In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. This creates a sort of inwardness, a sort of reverse perspective which has much in common with Oriental art.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The television generation is a grim bunch. It is much more serious than children of any other period—when they were frivolous, more whimsical. The television child is more earnest, more dedicated.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Most often the few seconds sandwiched between the hours of viewing—the “commercials”—reflect a truer understanding of the medium. There simply is no time for the narrative form, borrowed from earlier print technology. The story line must be abandoned. Up until very recently, television commercials were regarded as simply a bastard form, or vulgar folk art. They are influencing contemporary literature. Vide “In Cold Blood”, for instance.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The main cause for disappointment in and for criticism of television is the failure on the part of its critics to view it as a totally new technology which demands different sensory responses. These critics insist on regarding television as merely a degraded form of print technology. Critics of television have failed to realize that the motion pictures they are lionizing—such as “The Knack”, “Hard Day’s Night”, “What’s New Pussycat?”—would prove unacceptable as mass audience films if the audience had not been preconditioned by television commercials to abrupt zooms, elliptical editing, no story lines, flash cuts.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“When you consider television’s awesome power to educate, aren’t you thankful it doesn’t?”

— Donald Reilly, drawing in “The New Yorker”

“Movies are better than ever!”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Hollywood is often a fomenter of anti-colonialist revolutions.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The motion picture industry has provided a window on the world, and the colonized nations have looked through that window and have seen the things of which they have been deprived. It is perhaps not generally realized that a refrigerator can be a revolutionary symbol—to a people who have no refrigerators. A motorcar owned by a worker in one country can be a symbol of revolt to a people deprived of even the necessities of life… [Hollywood] helped to build up the sense of deprivation of man’s birthright, and that sense of deprivation has played a large part in the national revolutions of postwar Asia.”

— Sukarno, quoted by Marshall McLuhan from an article in “Variety”, titled: “Ice Boxes Sabotage Colonialism”

“[Today] Art
is anything
you can
get away
with.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[It’s a little bit like] the Balinese have a saying [/who say]: We have no art. We do everything as well as [possible/] we can.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 73

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

— Museum Curator

“We are proud of our museums where we display a way of living that we have made impossible.”

— A.K. Coomaraswamy, quoted in “Explorations” #8

“The museum has become a storehouse of human values, a cultural bloodbank.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Real, total war has become information war.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[Real, total war] is being fought by subtle electric informational media—under cold conditions, and constantly. The cold war is the real war front—a surround—involving everybody—all the time—everywhere.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Whenever hot wars are necessary these days, we conduct them in the backyards of the world with [the weapons of] the old technologies.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“These [hot] wars are happenings, tragic games. [It is no longer convenient, or suitable, to use the latest technologies for fighting our wars, because] the latest technologies have rendered war meaningless [—for there can be no victory].”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The hydrogen bomb is history’s exclamation point. [It ends an age-long sentence of manifest violence!]”

— Marshall McLuhan/narrator

“some
like
it
hot,”

— Marshall McLuhan

“some
like
it
cold.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Lights, camera, no action. Hollywood is host to Premier Khrushchev.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Did you happen to meet any soldiers, my dear, as you came through the woods?”

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

“The environment as a processor of information is propaganda. Propaganda ends where dialogue begins. You must talk to the media, not the programmer. To talk to the programmer is like complaining to a hot dog vendor at a ballpark about how badly your favorite team is playing.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“See Dick. See Dick protest. Protest, Dick! Protest!”

— Mort Gerberg, drawing

“The West shall shake the East awake… while ye have the night for the morn…”

— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”

“Thirty spokes are made one by holes in a hub,
By vacancies joining them for a wheel’s use;
The use of clay in molding pitchers
Comes from the hollow of its absence.
Doors, windows, in a house,
Are used for their emptiness.
Thus we are helped by what is not,
To use what is.”

— Laotze, “Tao Te Ching”

“{Electric circuitry is orientalizing the West.} The contained, the distinct, the separate—our Western legacy—are being replaced by the flowing, the unified, the fused.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The Newtonian God—the God who made a clocklike universe, wound it, and withdrew—died a long time ago. This is what Nietzsche meant and this is the God who is being observed.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Anyone who is looking around for a simulated icon of the deity in Newtonian guise might well be disappointed. The phrase “God is dead” applies aptly, correctly, validly to the Newtonian universe which is dead. The groundrule of that universe, upon which so much of our Western world is built, has dissolved.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.”

— Meister Eckhardt

“I must have been delirious, for I even sought amusement in speculating upon the relative velocities of their several descents towards the foam below.”

— Edgar Allen Poe, “A Descent into the Maelstrom” as quoted in “The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man”, p. v

“In his amusement born of rational detachment of his own situation, Poe’s mariner in “The Descent into the Maelstrom” staved off disaster by understanding the action of the whirlpool. His insight offers a possible stratagem for understanding our predicament, our electrically-configured whirl.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

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

“I–I hardly know, sir, just at present–at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”

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

“You see, Dad, Professor McLuhan says the environment that man creates becomes his medium for defining his role in it. The invention of type created linear, or sequential, thought, separating thought from action. Now, with TV and folk singing, thought and action are closer and social involvement is greater. We again live in a village. Get it?”

— Alan Dunn, drawing in “The New Yorker”

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

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