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
Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.
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.
Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.
Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.
We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.
Youth instinctively understand the present environment - the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.
It has always been the artist who realizes that the future is the present and uses his work to prepare the grounds for it
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.
The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods.
Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.
We go forward looking in the rearview mirror.