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 it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.
When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.
Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.
Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.
Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.
Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.
One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with.
The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds.
We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish.
In a cool medium, the audience is an active constituent of the viewing or listening experience. A girl wearing open-mesh silk stockings or glasses is inherently cool and sensual because the eye acts as a surrogate hand in filling in the low-definition image thus engendered. Which is why boys make passes at girls who wear glasses.
All media are extensions of some human faculty- psychic or physical.
Our permanent address is tommorrow.
One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.
Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.