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
I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
During the Second War, the U.S.O. sent special issues of the principal American magazines to the Armed Forces, with the ads omitted. The men insisted on having the ads back again. Naturally. The ads are by far the best part of any magazine or newspaper. More pains and thought, more wit and art go into the making of an ad than into any prose feature of press or magazine. Ads are news. What is wrong with them is that they are always good news.
Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.
Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.
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
Money is just the poor man's credit card.
Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.
ONLY THE SMALL SECRETS NEED TO BE PROTECTED.THE BIG ONES ARE KEPT SECRET BY PUBLIC INCREDULITY.
We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.
Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
Transmitted at the speed of light, all events on this planet are simultaneous. In the electric environment of information all events are simultaneous, there is no time or space separating events.
Television is teaching all the time. Does more educating than the schools and all the institutions of higher learning.
We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.