Marshall McLuhan - Electric Quotes

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The telegraph press mosaic is acoustic space as much as an electric circus.

Marshall McLuhan
The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message.

Marshall McLuhan
We now live in a technologically prepared environment that blankets the earth itself. The humanly contrived environment of electric information and power has begun to take precedence over the old environment of "nature." Nature, as it were, begins to be the content of our technology.

Marshall McLuhan
We are numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture.

Marshall McLuhan
We live invested in an electric information environment that is quite as imperceptible to us as water is to fish.

Marshall McLuhan
By involving all men in all men, by the electric extension of their own nervous systems, the new technology turns the figure of the primitive society into a universal ground that buries all previous figures.

Marshall McLuhan
There is no connection between the elements in an electric world, which is equivalent to being surrounded by the human unconscious.

Marshall McLuhan
The existential trauma had a physical basis in the first electric extension of our nervous system.

Marshall McLuhan
At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.

Marshall McLuhan
When we invent a new technology, we become cannibals. We eat ourselves alive since these technologies are merely extensions of ourselves. The new environment shaped by electric technology is a cannibalistic one that eats people. To survive one must study the habits of cannibals.

Marshall McLuhan
Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.

Marshall McLuhan
The Eskimo, like any pre-literate, leaps easily from the Paleolithic stone age to the electric age, by-passing the Neolithic specialism.

Marshall McLuhan
The family circle has widened. The world pool of information fathered by the electric media - movies, Telstar, flight - far surpasses any possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage.
Sometimes quoted as.. "whirlpool of information"

Marshall McLuhan
Unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitutes a total and near-instanteous transformation of culture, values and attitudes.

Marshall McLuhan
Youth instinctively understand the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.

Marshall McLuhan
In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin.

Marshall McLuhan
Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.

Marshall McLuhan
Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self- employment and artistic autonomy.

Marshall McLuhan
In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.

Marshall McLuhan
My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

Marshall McLuhan
Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.

Marshall McLuhan
The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.

Marshall McLuhan
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.

Marshall McLuhan
Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of "what the public wants" played over its own nerves.

Marshall McLuhan
The user of the electric light — or a hammer, or a language, or a book — is the content. As such, there is a total metamorphosis of the user by the interface. It is the metamorphosis that I consider the message.

Marshall McLuhan