Marshall McLuhan

The rythms of typing favour short, concise sentences, sentences with oral form.

In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worst. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialect of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation.

In large measure, writing is the spatialization of thought.

Erwin Schrodinger has explained how he and his fellow physicists had agreed that they would report their new discoveries and experiments in quantum physics in the language of Newtonian physics. That is, they agreed to discuss and report the non-visual, electronic world in the language of the visual world of Newton.

The alphabet was one thing when applied to clay or stone, and quite another when set down on light papyrus.

Gramophone and movies were merely the mechanization of speech and gesture. But the radio and TV were not just the electronification of speech and gesture but the electronification of the entire range of human personal expressiveness. With electronification the flow is taken out of the wire and into the vacuum tube circuit, which confers freedom and flexibility such as are in metaphor and in words themselves.

Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the \'content\' of the other, obscuring the operation of both.

New media may at first appear as mere codes of transmission for older achievement and established patterns of thought. But nobody could make the mistake of supposing that phonetic writing merely made it possible for the Greeks to set down in visual order what they had though and known before writing. In the same way printing made literature possible. It did not merely encode literature.

We have be-come irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.

... Their power to see environments as they really are.

You see, Dad, Professor McLuhan says that 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?

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion...

The wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye, clothing an extension of the skin, electric circuitry an extension of the central nervous system.

All discoveries in art and science result from an accumulation of errors.

Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.

Our motor car is our supreme form of privacy when we are away from home.

The genteel is a mighty catafalque of service-with-a-smile and flattering solicitude smothering every spontaneous movement of thought or feeling.

Any breakdown is a breakthrough.

Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher.

Education in a technological world of replaceable and expendable parts is neuter.

One matter Englishmen don't think in the least funny is their happy consciousness of possessing a deep sense of humor.

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

The medium is the message\' because it is the medium that shapes and controls the search and form of human associations and action.

The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.

It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudosimplicities of brutal directness.

The potential of any technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors...Computer are still serving mainly to sustain precomputer effects.

Information and images bump against each other every day in massive quantities, and the resonance of this interfacing is like the babble of a village or tavern gossip session.

The school system is the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.

Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.