Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CCwas a Canadian professor, philosopher, and public intellectual. His work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries. He was educated at the University of Manitoba and Cambridge University and began his teaching career as a Professor of English at several universities in the U.S. and Canada, before moving to the University of Toronto where he would remain for the...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth21 July 1911
CityEdmonton, Canada
CountryCanada
North Americans have a peculiar bias. They go outside to be alone and they go home to be social.
When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result.
Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on.
Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay.
Even mud gives the illusion of depth.
Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.
A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space.
All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.
Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.
TV acting is so extremely intimate, because of the peculiar involvement of the viewer with the completion or "closing" of the TV image, that the actor must achieve a great degree of spontaneous casualness that would be irrelevant in movie and lost on the stage. For the audience participates in the inner life of the TV actor as fully as in the outer life of the movie star. Technically, TV tends to be a close-up medium. The close-up that in the movie is used for shock is, on TV, a quite casual thing.
Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.
Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity.
Primitivism has become the vulgar cliché of much modern art and speculation.
Education, which should be helping youth to understand and adapt to their revolutionary new environments, is instead being used merely as an instrument of cultural aggression.