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 electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message
Time’ has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village... a simultaneous happening
To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.
In large measure, writing is the spatialization of thought.
To say that a body or its gravitational field 'bends in space' in its vicinity is the discuss visual space in acoustic terms.
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
As the age of information demands the simultaneous use of all our faculties, we discover that we are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved.
With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.
If it works, it's obsolete.
Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force.
First we build the tools, then they build us.
Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.
Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.
We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.