Marshall McLuhan - Understanding Media (1964)

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Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.

Marshall McLuhan
The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.

Marshall McLuhan
The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message.

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

Marshall McLuhan
We are numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture.

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

Marshall McLuhan
Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status.

Marshall McLuhan
The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.

Marshall McLuhan
Literate man, civilized man, tends to restrict and to separate functions, whereas tribal man has freely extended the form of his body to include the universe.

Marshall McLuhan
Today, computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language.

Marshall McLuhan
At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology.

Marshall McLuhan
Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness.

Marshall McLuhan
Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener. That is the immediate aspect of radio. A private experience. The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber.

Marshall McLuhan
The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.

Marshall McLuhan
The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.

Marshall McLuhan
All media exists to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values.

Marshall McLuhan
Ads seem to work on the very advanced principle that a small pellet or pattern in a noisy, redundant barrage of repetition will gradually assert itself. Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brain-washing. This depth principle of onslaught on the unconscious may be the reason why.

Marshall McLuhan
The press is a group confessional form that provides communal participation. The book is a private confessional form that provides a point of view.

Marshall McLuhan
One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information system.

Marshall McLuhan
The hot radio medium used in cool or nonliterate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment.

Marshall McLuhan
Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of "what the public wants" played over its own nerves.

Marshall McLuhan
Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.

Marshall McLuhan
The "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.

Marshall McLuhan
Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village size and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumour, and personal malice.

Marshall McLuhan
A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters.

Marshall McLuhan
Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self- employment and artistic autonomy.

Marshall McLuhan
A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor?

Marshall McLuhan
Ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure.

Marshall McLuhan
All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.

Marshall McLuhan
Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society.

Marshall McLuhan