Marshall McLuhan - The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

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Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on.

Marshall McLuhan
A fixed point of view becomes possible with print and ends the image as a plastic organism.

Marshall McLuhan
The levelling of inflexion and of wordplay became part of the program of applied knowledge in the seventeenth century.

Marshall McLuhan
Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society.

Marshall McLuhan
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
Philosophy was as naive as science in its unconscious acceptance of the assumptions or dynamic of typography.

Marshall McLuhan
Typography cracked the voices of silence.

Marshall McLuhan
The celebrated earthy tactility of Rabelais is a massive backwash of receding manuscript culture.

Marshall McLuhan
Marlowe anticipated Whitman's barbaric yawp by setting up a national PA system of blank verse – a rising iambic system of sound to suit the new success story.

Marshall McLuhan
The present volume to this point might be regarded as a gloss on a single text of Harold Innis: "The effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century."

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
When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized.

Marshall McLuhan
Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies.

Marshall McLuhan
Literacy affects the physiology as well as the psychic life of the African.

Marshall McLuhan
The Homeric hero becomes a split-man as he assumes an individual ego.

Marshall McLuhan
The portability of the book, like that of the easel-painting, added much to the new culture of individualism.

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
Print altered not only the spelling and grammar but the accentuation and inflection of languages, and made bad grammar possible.

Marshall McLuhan