Marshall McLuhan - Environment Quotes

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Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.

Marshall McLuhan
Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature.

Marshall McLuhan
Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.

Marshall McLuhan
Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a man-made environment that ends "Nature" and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed. Shakespeare at the Globe mentioning "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players" (As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7) has been justified by recent events in ways that would have struck him as entirely paradoxical. The results of living inside a proscenium arch of satellites is that the young now accept the public spaces of the earth as role-playing areas. Sensing this, they adopt costumes and roles and are ready to "do their thing" everywhere."

Marshall McLuhan
Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to loose.

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
As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art.

Marshall McLuhan
Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information.

Marshall McLuhan
Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perception... When these ratios change, men change.

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

Marshall McLuhan
The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.

Marshall McLuhan
If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

Marshall McLuhan
All media of communications are cliches serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns of associations and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness.

Marshall McLuhan
The new overkill is simply an extension of our nervous system into a total ecological service environment. Such a service environment can liquidate or terminate its beneficiaries as naturally as it sustains them.

Marshall McLuhan
The role of the artist is to create an Anti-environment as a means of perception and adjustment.

Marshall McLuhan
People in new environments always produce the new preceptual modality without any difficulty or awareness of change. It is later that the psychic and social realignments baffle societies.

Marshall McLuhan
Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay.

Marshall McLuhan
Jacques Ellul observes in Propaganda: When dialogue begins, propaganda ends. His theme, that propaganda is not this or that ideology but rather the action and coexistence of all media at once, explains why propaganda is environmental and invisible. The total life of any culture tends to be "propaganda", for this reason. It blankets perception and supresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom.

Marshall McLuhan
The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.

Marshall McLuhan
When you move into a new area, a new territory and learn a new language, the language is not a new subject, it is an environment, it is total.

Marshall McLuhan
Without an anti-environment, all environments are invisible.

Marshall McLuhan
Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology.

Marshall McLuhan
Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.

Marshall McLuhan
Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception.

Marshall McLuhan
Environments work us over and remake us. It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things.

Marshall McLuhan