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
The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication...is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts.
If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves.
Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.
The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.
We have to find the environments in which it will be possible to live with our new inventions.
The victory over Euclidean space was not achieved by isolated individuals, but by a field of young rebels opposed to all absolutes.
Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses.
Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.
The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.
It is perhaps typical of very creative minds that they hit very large nails not quite on the head.
Any ad consciously attended to is comical. Ads are not meant for conscious consumption. They are intended as subliminal pills for the subconsious in order to exercise an hypnotic spell, especially on sociologists.
Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.
The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb.
Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode - a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.