Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Applied knowledge in the Renaissance had to take the form of translation of the auditory into visual terms, of the plastic into retinal form. (p. 180)

With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life. (p. 177)

Every technology contrived and “outered” by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization. (p. 174)

Typography as the first mechanization of a handicraft is itself the perfect instance not of a new knowledge, but of applied knowledge. (p. 171)

The celebrated earthy tactility of Rabelais is a massive backwash of receding manuscript culture. (p. 170)

Rabelais offers a vision of the future of print culture as a consumer's paradise of applied knowledge. (p. 167)

The “interface” of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism – a formula for blitz and metamorphosis. (p. 161)

Until more than two centuries after printing nobody discovered how to maintain a single tone or attitude throughout a prose composition. (p. 154)

Scribal culture could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by typography. (p. 149)

The “natural magic” of the camera obscura anticipated Hollywood in turning the spectacle of the external world into a consumer commodity or package. (p. 146)

A fixed point of view becomes possible with print and ends the image as a plastic organism. (p. 144)

The invention of typography confirmed and extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly repeatable “commodity,” the first assembly-line, and the first mass-production. (p. 142)

Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class. (p. 136)

The sheer increase in the quantity of information movement favoured the visual organization of knowledge and the rise of perspective even before typography. (p. 128)

For the oral man the literal text contains all possible levels of meaning. (p. 126)