Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Every process pushed far enough tends to reverse or flip suddenly. Chiasmus – the reversal to process caused by increasing its speed, scope or size. (p. 6)

Paradox is the technique for seizing the conflicting aspects of any problem. Paradox coalesces or telescopes various facets of a complex process in a single instant. (p. 106)

By involving all men in all men, by the electric extension of their own nervous systems, the new technology turns the figure of the primitive society into a universal ground that buries all previous figures. (p. 25)

Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature. (p. 11)

In this book we turn to the study of new patterns of energy arising from man’s physical and psychic artifacts and social organizations. The only method for perceiving process and pattern is by inventory of effects obtained by the comparison and contrast of developing situations. (p. 8)

The young are really the heirs to a generation of incompetence.

Color is not so much a visual as a tactile medium.

Cartoons drove the photo back to myth and dream screen.

Since Sputnik, the earth has been wrapped in a dome-like blanket or bubble. Nature ended.

As the totem pole is tied to the lineality of the missionaries' Bible, so the igloo was made possible by the primus stove.

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

The Concept of Dread, by Soren Kierkegaard, appeared in 1844, first year of the commercial telegraph...It mentions the telegraph as a reason for dread and nowness or existenz.

The existential trauma had a physical basis in the first electric extension of our nervous system.

Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. We lose "touch" without it. Visual space is the space of detachment.

Visual space is the space of detachment. Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. (p. 194)