Marshall McLuhan - Understanding Media (1964)

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If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.

Marshall McLuhan
I think of Art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system, that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

Marshall McLuhan
The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy.

Marshall McLuhan
American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.

Marshall McLuhan
I am curious to know what would happen if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties...

Marshall McLuhan
The student of media soon comes to expect the New Media of any period whatever to be classed as 'pseudo' by those who acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be.

Marshall McLuhan
Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the "content" of the other, obscuring the operation of both.

Marshall McLuhan
The village had institutionalized all human functions in forms of low intensity.... Participation was high and organization was low. This is the formula for stability.

Marshall McLuhan
The alphabet was one thing when applied to clay or stone, and quite another when set down on light papyrus.

Marshall McLuhan
During the Second War, the U.S.O. sent special issues of the principal American magazines to the Armed Forces, with the ads omitted. The men insisted on having the ads back again. Naturally. The ads are by far the best part of any magazine or newspaper. More pains and thought, more wit and art go into the making of an ad than into any prose feature of press or magazine. Ads are news. What is wrong with them is that they are always good news.

Marshall McLuhan
To say that "the camera cannot lie" is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practised in its name.

Marshall McLuhan
To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.

Marshall McLuhan
The artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience, even though the majority of his audience may prefer to remain fixed in their old perceptual attitudes.

Marshall McLuhan
The message of radio is one of violent, unified implosion and resonance.

Marshall McLuhan
The copy [of an ad] is merely a punning gag to distract the critical faculties while the image of the [product] goes to work on the hypnotized viewer. Those who have spent their lives protesting about 'false and misleading ad copy' are godsends to advertisers, as teetotalers are to brewers, and moral censors are to books and films. The protesters are the best acclaimers and accelerators. Since the advent of pictures, the job of the ad copy is as incidental and latent as the 'meaning' of a poem is to a poem, or the words of a song are to a song.

Marshall McLuhan
Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.

Marshall McLuhan
War is never anything less than accelerated technological change.

Marshall McLuhan
An expensive ad represents the toil, attention, testing, wit, art, and skill of many people. Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials. Any expensive ad is as carefully built on the tested foundations of public stereotypes or 'sets' of established attitudes, as any skyscraper is built on bedrock.

Marshall McLuhan
The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.

Marshall McLuhan
The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.

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
It is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behaviour.

Marshall McLuhan
If we sit and talk in a dark room, words suddenly aquire new meanings and different textures... and on the radio. Given only the sound of a play, we have to fill in all of the senses, not just the sight of the action. So much do-it-yourself, or completion and closure of action, develops a kind of independent isolation in the young that makes them remote and inaccessible.

Marshall McLuhan
Although the medium is the message, the controls go beyond programming. The restraints are always directed to the content, which is always another medium. The content of the press is literary statement, as the content of the book is speech, and the content of the movie is the novel. So the effects of radio are quite independent of its programming.

Marshall McLuhan
It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV.

Marshall McLuhan
The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.

Marshall McLuhan
A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.

Marshall McLuhan
Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.

Marshall McLuhan
Radio comes to us ostensibly with person to person directness that is private and intimate, while in more urgent fact, it is really a subliminal echo chamber of magic power to touch remote and forgotten chords.

Marshall McLuhan
The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad and incomplete in the urban compound.

Marshall McLuhan