Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CCwas a Canadian professor, philosopher, and public intellectual. His work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries. He was educated at the University of Manitoba and Cambridge University and began his teaching career as a Professor of English at several universities in the U.S. and Canada, before moving to the University of Toronto where he would remain for the...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth21 July 1911
CityEdmonton, Canada
CountryCanada
Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression.
Arists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium or to release the power of another.
A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.
The movie, by sheer speeding up of the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configurations and structure.
The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.
Life. Consider the alternative.
I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.
The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.
Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.
Invention is the mother of necessities.
In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses.
There is no more great men; there is only great committees.
It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.
The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.