Marshall McLuhan - Visual Quotes

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The invention of typography confirmed and extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly repeatable commodity, the first assembly-line, and the first mass-production.

Marshall McLuhan
Current concern with reading and spelling reform steers away from visual to auditory stress.

Marshall McLuhan
Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.

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

Marshall McLuhan
By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.

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
Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class.

Marshall McLuhan
Applied knowledge in the Renaissance had to take the form of translation of the auditory into visual terms, of the plastic into retinal form.

Marshall McLuhan
The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography. The printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, created extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly.

Marshall McLuhan
The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures.

Marshall McLuhan
The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world.

Marshall McLuhan
Color is not so much a visual as a tactile medium.

Marshall McLuhan
Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.

Marshall McLuhan
The increase of visual stress among the Greeks alienated them from the primitive art that the electronic age now reinvents after interiorizing the unified field of electric all-at-onceness.

Marshall McLuhan
Interdeterminacy was a figure-ground problem arising from incongruity between the visual bias of classical science and the new acoustic sensibilities.

Marshall McLuhan
Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.

Marshall McLuhan
The ways of thinking implanted by electronic culture are very different from those fostered by print culture. Since the Renaissance most methods and procedures have strongly tended towards stress on the visual organization of knowledge.

Marshall McLuhan
When Coleridge said that all men are born either Platonists or Aristotelians, he was saying that all men tend to be either acoustic or visual in their sensory bias.

Marshall McLuhan
Literacy, in translating man out of the closed world of tribal depth and resonance, gave man an eye for an ear and ushered him into a visual open world of specialized and divided consciousness.

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
Chinese script is not visual but iconic and tactile. It does not disturb the tribal bonds.

Marshall McLuhan
The world of the Greeks illustrates why visual appearances cannot interest people before the interiorization of alphabetic technology.

Marshall McLuhan
Sheer visual quantity evokes the magical resonance of the tribal hoard. The box office looms as a return to the echo chamber of bardic incantation.

Marshall McLuhan
The sheer increase in the quantity of information movement favoured the visual organization of knowledge and the rise of perspective even before typography.

Marshall McLuhan
To say that a body or its gravitational field 'bends in space' in its vicinity is the discuss visual space in acoustic terms.

Marshall McLuhan