- I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.
- I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.
- Affluence creates poverty.
- 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.
- Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts.
- Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.
- An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.
- We drive into the future using only our rear view mirror.
- 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.
- All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
- The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.
- The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
- A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
- Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
- Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Marshall McLuhan
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It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.
ReplyDeleteIn this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.
As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.'
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.
A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
Art is anything you can get away with.
As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
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.
For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.
Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.
Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.
Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.
Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.