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The Wheel Is An Extension Of The Foot, The Book Is An Extension Of The Eye, Clothing An Extension Of The Skin, Electric Circuitry An Extension Of The Central Nervous System.

-Marshall McLuhan

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The Wheel Is An

Marshall McLuhan

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The Wheel Is An Extension Of The Foot, The Book Is An Extension Of The Eye, Clothing An Extension Of The Skin, Electric Circuitry An Extension Of The Central Nervous System.

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The Hallucinogenic World, In Environmental Terms, Can Be Considered As A Forlorn Effort Of Man To Match The Speed Of Power Of Hisextended Nervous System (which We Call The "electronic World") By Intensifying The Activity Of His Inner Nervous System.

It Is Perhaps Typical Of Very Creative Minds That They Hit Very Large Nails Not Quite On The Head.

An Administrator In A Bureaucratic World Is A Man Who Can Feel Big By Merging His Non-entity In An Abstraction. A Real Person In Touch With Real Things Inspires Terror In Him.

Appetite Is Essentially Insatiable, And Where It Operates As A Criterion Of Both Action And Enjoyment (that Is, Everywhere In The Western World Since The Sixteenth Century) It Will Infallibly Discover Congenial Agencies (mechanical And Political) Of Expression.

Politics Will Eventually Be Replaced By Imagery. The Politician Will Be Only Too Happy To Abdicate In Favor Of His Image, Because The Image Will Be So Much More Powerful Than He Could Ever Be.

Any Loss Of Identity Prompts People To Seek Reassurance And Rediscovery Of Themselves By Testing, And Even By Violence. Today, The Electric Revolution, The Wired Planet, And The Information Environment Involve Everybody In Everybody To The Point Of Individual Extinction.

In Antiquity And The Middle Ages Reading Was Necessarily Reading Aloud.

Antipathy, Dissimilarity Of Views, Hate, Contempt, Can Accompany True Love.

As The Age Of Information Demands The Simultaneous Use Of All Our Faculties, We Discover That We Are Most At Leisure When We Are Most Intensely Involved.

I Don't Necessarily Agree With Everything I Say.

In A Cool Medium, The Audience Is An Active Constituent Of The Viewing Or Listening Experience. A Girl Wearing Open-mesh Silk Stockings Or Glasses Is Inherently Cool And Sensual Because The Eye Acts As A Surrogate Hand In Filling In The Low-definition Image Thus Engendered. Which Is Why Boys Make Passes At Girls Who Wear Glasses.

The Modern Little Red Riding Hood, Reared On Singing Commercials, Has No Objection To Being Eaten By The Wolf.

Advertising Business

The Car Has Become The Carapace, The Protective And Aggressive Shell, Of Urban And Suburban Man.

When Information Rubs Against Information The Results Are Startling And Effective. The Perrenial Quest For Involvement, Fill-in, Takes Many Forms.

The Age Of Automation Is Going To Be The Age Of "do It Yourself".

Characteristics

The Reader Is The Content Of Any Poem Or Of The Language He Employs, And In Order To Use Any Of These Forms, He Must Put Them On.

When Things Come At You Very Fast, Naturally You Lose Touch With Yourself.

If A Work Of Art Is To Explore New Environments, It Is Not To Be Regarded As A Blueprint But Rather As A Form Of Action-painting.

Food For The Mind Is Like Food For The Body: The Inputs Are Never The Same As The Outputs.

For Tribal Man, Space Was The Uncontrollable Mystery. For Technological Man It Is Time That Occupies The Same Role.

The School System Is The Homogenizing Hopper Into Which We Toss Our Integral Tots For Processing.

Information And Images Bump Against Each Other Every Day In Massive Quantities, And The Resonance Of This Interfacing Is Like The Babble Of A Village Or Tavern Gossip Session.

It Is One Of The Peculiar Characteristics Of The Photograph That It Isolates Single Moments In Time.

The Tribalizing Power Of The New Electronic Media, The Way In Which They Return To Us To The Unified Fields Of The Old Oral Cultures, To Tribal Cohesion And Pre-individualist Patterns Of Thought, Is Little Understood. Tribalism Is The Sense Of The Deep Bond Of Family, The Closed Society As The Norm Of Community.

Violence, Whether Spiritual Or Physical, Is A Quest For Identity And The Meaningful. The Less Identity, The More Violence.

Publication Is A Self-invasion Of Privacy.

In Experimental Art, Men Are Given The Exact Specifications Of Coming Violence To Their Own Psyches From Their Own Counter-irritant Or Technology... But The Counter-irritant Usually Proves A Greater Plague Than The Initial Irritant, Like A Drug Habit.

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.

Clear Prose Indicates The Absence Of Thought.

The Business Of The Advertiser Is To See That We Go About Our Business With Some Magic Spell Or Tune Or Slogan Throbbing Quietly In The Background Of Our Minds.

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.

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.

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.

One Of The Effects Of Living With Electric Information Is That We Live Habitually In A State Of Information Overload. There's Always More Than You Can Cope With.

Since With Electricity We Extend Our Central Nervous System Globally, Instantly Interrelating Every Human Experience.

Human Experience

Nothing Is Inevitable If We Are Willing To Contemplate What Is Happening.

It Is Critical Vision Alone Which Can Mitigate The Unimpeded Operation Of The Automatic.

All Media Work Us Over Completely.

Cultural Change

Scribal Culture And Gothic Architecture Were Both Concerned With Light Through, Not Light On.

Electricity Does Not Centralize, But Decentralizes.

Man Works When He Is Partially Involved. When He Is Totally Involved He Is At Play Or Leisure.

In The Phaedrus, Plato Argued That The New Arrival Of Writing Would Revolutionize Culture For The Worst. He Suggested That It Would Substitute Reminiscence For Thought And Mechanical Learning For The True Dialect Of The Living Quest For Truth By Discourse And Conversation.

The New Electronic Independence Re-creates The World In The Image Of A Global Village.

Anything That's Popular Is A Rear-view Image.

Television Is Teaching All The Time. Does More Educating Than The Schools And All The Institutions Of Higher Learning.

Radical Changes Of Identity, Happening Suddenly And In Very Brief Intervals Of Time, Have Proved More Deadly And Destructive Of Human Values Than Wars Fought With Hardware Weapons.

Any 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.

Most People Are Alive In An Earlier Time, But You Must Be Alive In Our Own Time.

All The New Media Are Art Forms Which Have The Power Of Imposing, Like Poetry, Their Own Assumptions.

The Task Confronting Contemporary Man Is To Live With The Hidden Ground Of His Activities As Familiarly As Our Literate Predecessors Lived With The Figure Minus Ground.

It Is The Framework Which Changes With Each New Technology And Not Just The Picture Within The Frame.

The Content Or Time-clothing Of Any Medium Or Culture Is The Preceding Medium Or Culture.

The Alphabet Was One Thing When Applied To Clay Or Stone, And Quite Another When Set Down On Light Papyrus.

A Nomadic Society Cannot Experience Enclosed Space.

Current Illusion Is That Science Has Abolished All Natural Laws.

When Information Overload Occurs, Pattern Recognition Is How To Determine Truth.

Electronic Man Has No Physical Body.

"work" Does Not Exist In A Nonliterate World. The Primitive Hunter Or Fisherman Did No Work, Any More Than Does The Poet, Painter, Or Thinker Of Today. Where The Whole Man Is Involved There Is No Work.

Typography Tended To Alter Language From A Means Of Perception And Exploration To A Portable Commodity.

Today's Child Is Bewildered When He Enters The 19th Century Environment That Still Characterizes The Educational Establishment Where Information Is Scarce But Ordered And Structured By Fragmented, Classified Patterns Subjects, And Schedules.

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.

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.

Everybody At The Speed Of Light Tends To Become A Nobody.

If The Nineteenth Century Was The Age Of The Editorial Chair, Ours Is The Century Of The Psychiatrist's Couch.

The Tv Camera Has No Shutter. It Does Not Deal With Aspects Or Facets Of Objects In High Resolution. It Is A Means Of Direct Pick-up By The Electrical Groping Over Surfaces.

Moral Indignation Is A Technique Used To Endow The Idiot With Dignity.

I Do Not Explain, I Explore.

My Main Theme Is The Extension Of The Nervous System In The Electric Age, And Thus, The Complete Break With Five Thousand Years Of Mechanical Technology. This I State Over And Over Again. I Do Not Say Whether It Is A Good Or Bad Thing. To Do So Would Be Meaningless And Arrogant.

First We Shape Our Tools, Thereafter They Shape Us

Professionalism Merges The Individual Into Patterns Of Total Environment. Amateurism Seeks The Development Of The Total Awareness Of The Individual And The Critical Awareness Of The Groundrules Of Society. The Amateur Can Afford To Lose. The Professional Tends To Classify And Specialise, To Accept Uncritically The Groundrules Of The Environment. The Groundrules Provided By The Mass Response Of His Colleagues Serve As A Pervasive Environment Of Which He Is Contentedly Unaware. The 'expert' Is The Man Who Stays Put.

Until Writing Was Invented, Man Lived In Acoustic Space: Boundless, Directionless, Horizonless, In The Dark Of The Mind, In The World Of Emotion.

All Words, In Every Language, Are Metaphors.

The Name Of A Man Is A Numbing Blow From Which He Never Recovers.

The Global Village Is A Place Of Very Arduous Interfaces And Very Abrasive Situations.

Every Innovation Scraps Its Immediate Predecessor And Retrieves Still Older Figures – It Causes Floods Of Antiques Or Nostalgic Art Forms And Stimulates The Search For Museum Pieces.

The Photograph Reverses The Purpose Of Travel, Which Until Now Had Been To Encounter The Strange And Unfamiliar.

The Artist Is A Person Who Is Expert In The Training Of Perception.

Some Of My Fellow Academics Are Very Hostile, But I Sympathize With Them. They've Been Asleep For 500 Years And They Don't Like Anybody Who Comes Along And Stirs Them Up.

Canada Is The Only Country In The World That Knows How To Live Without An Identity.

Faced With Information Overload, We Have No Alternative But Pattern-recognition.

If People Were Able To Be Convinced That Art Is Precise Advance Knowledge Of How To Cope With The Psychic And Social Consequences Of The Next Technology, Would They All Become Artists?

America Is The Only Country Ever Founded On The Printed Word.

The New Media Are Not Ways Of Relating To Us The 'real' World; They Are The Real World And They Reshape What Remains Of The Old World At Will.

Obsolescence Never Meant The End Of Anything, It's Just The Beginning.

Advertising Is An Environmental Striptease For A World Of Abundance.

Good Taste Is The First Refuge Of The Non Creative. It Is The Last Ditch Stand Of The Artist.

The 'expert' Is The Man Who Stays Put.

As The Unity Of The Modern World Becomes Increasingly A Technological Rather Than A Social Affair, The Techniques Of The Arts Provide The Most Valuable Means Of Insight Into The Real Direction Of Our Own Collective Purposes.

The Ordinary Person Senses The Greatness Of The Odds Against Him Even Without Thought Or Analysis, And He Adapts His Attitudes Unconsciously. A Huge Passivity Has Settled On Industrial Society. For People Carried About In Mechanical Vehicles, Earning Their Living By Waiting On Machines, Listening Much Of The Waking Day To Canned Music, Watching Packaged Movie Entertainment And Capsulated News, For Such People It Would Require An Exceptional Degree Of Awareness And An Especial Heroism Of Effort To Be Anything But Supine Consumers Of Processed Goods.

The Victory Over Euclidean Space Was Not Achieved By Isolated Individuals, But By A Field Of Young Rebels Opposed To All Absolutes.

The Content Or Message Of Any Particular Medium Has About As Much Importance As The Stenciling On The Casing Of An Atomic Bomb.

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.

Medieval And Ancient Sensibility Now Dominates Our Time As Acoustic And Multisensory Awareness Displaces The Merely Visual.

The Young Today Cannot Follow Narrative But They Are Alert To Drama. They Cannot Bear Description But They Love Landscape And Action.

Mass Man Is A Phenomenon Of Electric Speed, Not Of Physical Quantity.

When People Become Too Intense, Too Serious, They Will Have Trouble In Relating To Any Sort Of Social Game Or Norm. Perhaps This Is Why Jokes Are So Important. On One Hand They Tell Us About Where The Problems And Grievances Are, And, At The Same Time, They Provide The Means Of Enduring These Grievances By Laughing At The Problems.

Ads Represent The Main Channel Of Intellectual And Artistic Effort In The Modern World.

Literacy, The Visual Technology, Dissolved The Tribal Magic By Means Of Its Stress On Fragmentation And Specialization And Created The Individual.

...the Logic Of The Photograph Is Neither Verbal Nor Syntactical, A Condition Which Renders Literary Culture Quite Helpless To Cope With The Photograph.

The Computer Is The Most Extraordinary Of Man's Technological Clothing; It's An Extension Of Our Central Nervous System. Beside It, The Wheel Is A Mere Hula-hoop.

Poetry And The Arts Can’t Exist In America. Mere Exposure To The Arts Does Nothing For A Mentality Which Is Incorrigibly Dialectical. The Vital Tensions And Nutritive Action Of Ideogram Remain Inaccessible To This State Of Mind.

Madison Avenue Is A Very Powerful Aggression Against Private Consciousness. A Demand That You Yield Your Private Consciousness To Public Manipulation.

To See A Man Slip On A Banana Skin Is To See A Rationally Structured System Suddenly Translated Into A Whirling Machine.

In The Land Of The Blind, The One-eyed Man Is A Hallucinating Idiot...for He Sees What No One Else Does: Things That, To Everyone Else, Are Not There.

North Americans Have A Peculiar Bias. They Go Outside To Be Alone And They Go Home To Be Social.

The Car Has Become An Article Of Dress Without Which We Feel Uncertain, Unclad, And Incomplete In The Urban Compound.

I May Be Wrong, But I'm Never In Doubt.

Youth Instinctively Understand The Present Environment - The Electric Drama. It Lives Mythically And In Depth.

The Business Of Art Is No Longer The Communication Of Thoughts Or Feelings Which Are To Be Conceptually Ordered, But A Direct Participation In An Experience. The Whole Tendency Of Modern Communication...is Towards Participation In A Process, Rather Than Apprehension Of Concepts.

The Method Of Our Time Is To Use Not A Single But Multiple Models For Exploration.

The Real News Is Bad News.

I Wouldn't Have Seen It If I Hadn't Believed It.

Language Always Preserves A Play Or Figure/ground Relation Between Experience, And Perception And Its Replay In Expression.

Explore The Situation. Statements Are Expendable. Don't Keep On Looking In The Rearview Mirror And Defending The Status Quo Which Is Outmoded The Moment It Happened.

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.

On Spaceship Earth There Are No Passengers; Everybody Is A Member Of The Crew. We Have Moved Into An Age In Which Everybody's Activities Affect Everybody Else.

The Poet, The Artist, The Sleuth, Whoever Sharpens Our Perception Tends To Antisocial; Rarely 'well Adjusted,' He Cannot Go Along With Currents And Trends.

Why Is It So Easy To Acquire The Solutions Of Past Problems And So Difficult To Solve Current Ones

The Movie, By Sheer Speeding Up Of The Mechanical, Carried Us From The World Of Sequence And Connections Into The World Of Creative Configurations And Structure.

The New Is Always Made Up Of The Old, Or Rather, What People See In The New Is Always The Old Thing. The Rear-view Mirror. The Future Of The Future Is The Present, And This Is Something That People Are Terrified Of.

Our Technology Forces Us To Live Mythically, But We Continue To Think Fragmentarily, And On Single, Separate Planes.

At Electric Speed, All Forms Are Pushed To The Limits Of Their Potential.

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.

The Space Of Early Greek Cosmology Was Structured By Logos - Resonant Utterance Or Word.

Today We Are Beginning To Notice That The New Media Are Not Just Mechanical Gimmicks For Creating Worlds Of Illusion, But New Languages With New And Unique Powers Of Expression.

Historians And Archaeologists Will One Day Discover That The Ads Of Our Time Are The Richest And Most Faithful Reflections That Any Society Ever Made Of Its Entire Range Of Activities.

The Scientist Rigorously Defends His Right To Be Ignorant Of Almost Everything Except His Specialty.

The Present Is Always Invisible Because Its Environmental. No Environment Is Perceptible, Simply Because It Saturates The Whole Field Of Attention.

The User Of The Electric Light - Or A Hammer, Or A Language, Or A Book - Is The Content. As Such, There Is A Total Metamorphosis Of The User By The Interface. It Is The Metamorphosis That I Consider The Message.

The Electric Age ... Established A Global Network That Has Much The Character Of Our Central Nervous System.

Logos Is The Formal Cause Of The Kosmos And All Things, Responsible For Their Nature And Configuration.

A Point Of View Can Be A Dangerous Luxury When Substituted For Insight And Understanding.

When New Technologies Impose Themselves On Societies Long Habituated To Older Technologies, Anxieties Of All Kinds Result.

Societies Have Always Been Shaped More By The Nature Of The Media By Which Men Communicate Than By The Content Of The Communication.

In Television, Images Are Projected At You. You Are The Screen. The Images Wrap Around You. You Are The Vanishing Point.

The Specialist Is One Who Never Makes Small Mistakes While Moving Toward The Grand Fallacy.

Ads Are Carefully Designed By The Madison Avenue Frog-men Of-the-mind For Semiconscious Exposure.

Gramophone And Movies Were Merely The Mechanization Of Speech And Gesture. But The Radio And Tv Were Not Just The Electronification Of Speech And Gesture But The Electronification Of The Entire Range Of Human Personal Expressiveness. With Electronification The Flow Is Taken Out Of The Wire And Into The Vacuum Tube Circuit, Which Confers Freedom And Flexibility Such As Are In Metaphor And In Words Themselves.

New Media Are New Archetypes, At First Disguised As Degradations Of Older Media.

Language As The Technology Of Human Extension, Whose Powers Of Division And Separation We Know So Well, May Have Been The "tower Of Babel" By Which Men Sought To Scale The Highest Heavens. Today Computers Hold Out The Promise Of A Means Of Instant Tr

Darkness Is To Space What Silence Is To Sound, I.e., The Interval.

Transmitted At The Speed Of Light, All Events On This Planet Are Simultaneous. In The Electric Environment Of Information All Events Are Simultaneous, There Is No Time Or Space Separating Events.

The Only Way To Recover The Old World Is To Induce The Media Into Vomiting It Back Up.

The Winner Is One Who Knows When To Drop Out In Order To Get In Touch.

Life. Consider The Alternative.

... Their Power To See Environments As They Really Are.

World War Iii Is A Guerrilla Information War With No Division Between Military And Civilian Participation.

One Thing About Which Fish Know Exactly Nothing Is Water, Since They Have No Anti-environment Which Would Enable Them To Perceive The Element They Live In.

Cubism ('multi-locationalism') Is One Of The Painterly Forms Of Acoustic Space.

The Electric Light Is Pure Information. It Is A Medium Without A Message

What Is Very Little Understood About The Electronic Age Is That It Angelizes Man, Disembodies Him. Turns Him Into Software.

Our Technology Forces Us To Live Mythically

First We Build The Tools, Then They Build Us.

As Information Becomes Our Environment, It Becomes Mandatory To Program The Environment Itself As A Work Of Art.

Mass Transportation Is Doomed To Failure In North America Because A Person's Car Is The Only Place Where He Can Be Alone And Think.

Time’ Has Ceased, 'space' Has Vanished. We Now Live In A Global Village... A Simultaneous Happening

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.

As Technology Advances, It Reverses The Characteristics Of Every Situation Again And Again. The Age Of Automation Is Going To Be The Age Of 'do It Yourself.'

Any Ad Consciously Attended To Is Comical. Ads Are Not Meant For Conscious Consumption. They Are Intended As Subliminal Pills For The Subconsious In Order To Exercise An Hypnotic Spell, Especially On Sociologists.

The Only People Who Have Proof Of Their Sanity Are Those Who Have Been Discharged From Mental Institutions

Typography Is Not Only A Technology But Is In Itself A Natural Resource Or Staple, Like Cotton Or Timber Or Radio; And, Like Any Staple, It Shapes Not Only Private Sense Ratios But Also Patterns Of Communal Interdependence.

Diaper Backward Spells Repaid. Think About It.

People Who Write Obscurely Are Either Unskilled In Writing Or Up To Mischief.

Technology Is That Which Separates Us From Our Environment.

Those Conspiracies That Are Too Incredible To Be Believed, Are By The Same Right, Those Which Most Often Succeed.

By Phonemic Trans-formation Into Visual Terms, The Alphabet Became A Universal, Abstract, Static Container Of Meaningless Sounds.

The Rythms Of Typing Favour Short, Concise Sentences, Sentences With Oral Form.

Environments Are Not Just Containers, But Are Processes That Change The Content Totally.

The Greatest Propaganda In The World Is Our Mother Tongue, That Is What We Learn As Children, And Which We Learn Unconsciously. That Shapes Our Perceptions For Life. That Is Propaganda At Its Most Extreme Form.

While Poe And The Symbolists Were Exploring The Irrational In Literature, Freud Had Begun To Explore The Resonant Figure/ground Double-plot Of The Conscious And Unconscious.

If We Understand The Revolutionary Transformations Caused By New Media, We Can Anticipate And Control Them; But If We Continue In Our Self-induced Subliminal Trance, We Will Be Their Slaves.

To Say That A Body Or Its Gravitational Field 'bends In Space' In Its Vicinity Is The Discuss Visual Space In Acoustic Terms.

The Literate Man Is A Sucker For Propaganda...you Cannot Propagandize A Native. You Can Sell Him Rum And Trinkets, But You Cannot Sell Him Ideas.

Technologies Themselves, Regardless Of Content, Produce A Hemispheric Bias In The Users.

Control Over Change Would Seem To Consist In Moving Not With It But Ahead Of It. Anticipation Gives The Power To Deflect And Control Force.

I Don't Want Them To Believe Me, I Just Want Them To Think.

The Suddenness Of The Leap From Hardware To Software Cannot But Produce A Period Of Anarchy And Collapse, Especially In The Developed Countries.

It Is The Weak And Confused Who Worship The Pseudosimplicities Of Brutal Directness.

With The Arrival Of Electric Technology, Man Extended, Or Set Outside Himself, A Live Model Of The Central Nervous System Itself. To The Degree That This Is So, It Is A Development That Suggests A Desperate And Suicidal Autoamputation, As If The Central Nervous System Could No Longer Depend On The Physical Organs To Be Protective Buffers Against The Slings And Arrows Of Outrageous Mechanism.

The Laws Of The Media, In Tetrad Form, Bring Logos And Formal Cause Up To Date To Reveal Analytically The Structure Of All Human Artefacts.

The Artist Is The Person Who Invents The Means To Bridge Between Biological Inheritance And The Environments Created By Technological Innovation.

There Is A Real, Living Unity In Our Time, As In Any Other, But It Lies Submerged Under A Superficial Hubbub Of Sensation.

The Past Went That-a-way. When Faced With A Totally New Situation, We Tend Always To Attach Ourselves To The Objects, To The Flavor Of The Most Recent Past. We Look At The Present Through A Rear View Mirror. We March Backwards Into The Future.

Einstein Pronounced The Doom Of Continuous Or 'rational' Space, And The Way Was Made Clear For Picasso And The Marx Brothers And Mad Magazine.

Nowadays There Is No Conversation At All. Teachers Distrust Talk As Much As Business Men.

Only The Small Secrets Need To Be Protected. The Large Ones Are Kept Secret By Public Incredulity.

Ads Push The Principle Of Noise All The Way To The Plateau Of Persuasion. They Are Quite In Accord With The Procedures Of Brainwashing.

A Successful Book Cannot Afford To Be More Than Ten Percent New.

Everybody Tends To Merge His Identity With Other People At The Speed Of Light. It's Called Being Mass Man.

I'm Not Sure Who Discovered Water, But I'm Pretty Sure It Wasn't A Fish.

The More The Data Banks Record About Each One Of Us, The Less We Exist.

If It Works, It's Obsolete.

Innovation For Holders Of Conventional Wisdom Is Not Novelty But Annihilation.

In Jesus Christ, There Is No Distance Or Separation Between The Medium And The Message: It Is The One Case Where We Can Say That The Medium And The Message Are Fully One And The Same.

Our Motor Car Is Our Supreme Form Of Privacy When We Are Away From Home.

In Large Measure, Writing Is The Spatialization Of Thought.

In This Electronic Age We See Ourselves Being Translated More And More Into The Form Of Information, Moving Toward The Technological Extension Of Consciousness.

Media Are Means Of Extending And Enlarging Our Organic Sense Lives Into Our Environment.

Affluence Creates Poverty.

You See, Dad, Professor Mcluhan Says That The Environment That Man Creates Becomes His Medium For Defining His Role In It. The Invention Of Type Created Linear, Or Sequential Thought, Separating Thought From Action. Now, With Tv And Folk Singing, Thought And Action Are Closer And Social Involvement Is Greater. We Again Live In A Village. Get It?

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