Marshall McLuhan Quotes

The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message. (p. 8)

The "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. (p. 8)

One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information system. (p. 298)

The press is a group confessional form that provides communal participation. The book is a private confessional form that provides a “point of view.” (p. 204)

All media exists to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values. (p. 199)

Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status. (p. 133)

War is never anything less than accelerated technological change. (p. 102)

If the criminal appears as a nonconformist who is unable to meet the demand of technology that we behave in uniform and continuous patterns, literate man is quite inclined to see others who cannot conform as somewhat. (p. 31)

We are as numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture. (p. 9)

It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. (p. 9)

It is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behaviour.

In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner. (p. 4)

There is nothing willful or arbitrary about the Innis mode of expression. Were it to be translated into perspective prose, it would not only require huge space, but the insight into the modes of interplay among forms of organisation would also be lost. Innis sacrificed point of view and prestige to his sense of the urgent need for insight. A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding. As Innis got more insight he abandoned any mere point of view in his presentation of knowledge. When he interrelates the development of the steam press with 'the consolidation of the vernaculars' and the rise of nationalism and revolution he is not reporting anybody's point of view, least of all his own. He is setting up a mosaic configuration or galaxy for insight … Innis makes no effort to "spell out" the interrelations between the components in his galaxy. He offers no consumer packages in his later work, but only do-it-yourself kits...

The present volume to this point might be regarded as a gloss on a single text of Harold Innis: "The effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century."

Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.