Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Tactility is space of the interval.

When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments. (p. 180)

The only cool PR is provided by one's enemies. They toil incessantly and for free. (88)

Chinese script is not visual but iconic and tactile. It does not disturb the tribal bonds. (p. 72)

The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture. (p. 168)

Privacy invasion is now one of biggest knowledge industries. (p. 24)

One touch of nature makes the whole world tin.

Acoustic space is totally discontinuous, like touch. It is a sphere without centers or margins.

The telegraph press mosaic is acoustic space as much as an electric circus.

Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information.

The newspaper is a corporate symbolist poem, environmental and invisible, as poem.

World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation. (p.66)

Disarmament is illogical and futile, unless one is prepared to regard the available means of production and social organization as affording unique social ends. To divert electrical energy and circuitry into atomic bombs shows the same imaginative power as wiring the dining-room chairs to enable one to electrocute the sitter in the event that he might prove hostile. It is part of the age-old habit of using new means for old purposes instead of discovering what are the new goals contained in the new means. (p.202)

Another theme of the Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is "pastimes are past times". The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the twentieth century the number of past times that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of doubleness and interplay since this kind of hendiadys-dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy. (p.99)

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.