Marshall McLuhan - Space Quotes

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For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.

Marshall McLuhan
The human family now exists under conditions of a global village. We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums.

Marshall McLuhan
Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness [all-at-once-ness]. 'Time' has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village...a simultaneous happening...The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

Marshall McLuhan
Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. We lose "touch" without it. Visual space is the space of detachment.

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
Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses.

Marshall McLuhan
Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space... it is a cosmic, invisible architecture of the human dark.

Marshall McLuhan
Acoustic space is totally discontinuous, like touch. It is a sphere without centers or margins.

Marshall McLuhan
The victory over Euclidean space was not achieved by isolated individuals, but by a field of young rebels opposed to all absolutes.

Marshall McLuhan
Gutenberg made all history available as classified data: the transportable book brought the world of the dead into the space of the gentlemen's library; the telegraph brought the entire world of the living to the workman's breakfast table.

Marshall McLuhan
Tactility is the space of the interval; acoustic space is spherical and resonant.

Marshall McLuhan
Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.

Marshall McLuhan
A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space.

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

Marshall McLuhan
The Gutenberg galaxy was theoretically dissolved in 1905 with the discovery of curved space, but in practice it had been invaded by the telegraph two generations before that.

Marshall McLuhan
Our senses are not receptors so much as reactors and makers of different modalities of space. Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things, but the very life of things in the mind.

Marshall McLuhan
The pre-atomist multisensory void was an animate, pulsating, and moving vibrant interval, neither container nor contained, acoustic space penetrated by tactility.

Marshall McLuhan
Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space.

Marshall McLuhan
There are no connections in resonant space. There are only interfaces and metamorphoses.

Marshall McLuhan
The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos – resonant utterance or word.

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
Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.

Marshall McLuhan
The Greeks encountered the confusion of tongues when numbers invaded Euclidean space.

Marshall McLuhan
Writing turned a spotlight on the high, dim Sierras of speech; writing was the visualization of acoustic space. It lit up the dark.

Marshall McLuhan
Each of our senses makes its own space, but no sense can function in isolation. Only as sight relates the touch, or kinaesthesia, or sound, can the eye see.

Marshall McLuhan