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
All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.
Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.
TV acting is so extremely intimate, because of the peculiar involvement of the viewer with the completion or "closing" of the TV image, that the actor must achieve a great degree of spontaneous casualness that would be irrelevant in movie and lost on the stage. For the audience participates in the inner life of the TV actor as fully as in the outer life of the movie star. Technically, TV tends to be a close-up medium. The close-up that in the movie is used for shock is, on TV, a quite casual thing.
Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.
Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity.
Primitivism has become the vulgar cliché of much modern art and speculation.
Education, which should be helping youth to understand and adapt to their revolutionary new environments, is instead being used merely as an instrument of cultural aggression.
We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies.
The story begins only when the book closes.
I am a Christian according to my conscience in belief,in purpose and wish;Mnot of course by the orthodox standard. But I am content, and have a feeling of trust and safety. The Machiavellian mind and the merchant mind are at one in their simple faith in the power of segmental division to rule all--in the dichotomy of power and morals and of money and morals.
Current illusion is that science has abolished all natural laws.
The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by the electric media--movies, Telstar, flight--far surpassesany possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage.
Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology.
The circuited city of the future will not be the huge hunk of concentrated real estate created by the railway. It will take on a totally new meaning under conditions of very rapid movement. It will be an information megalopolis.