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
Education is civil defence against media fallout.
It is possible to deal with the entire environment as a work of art.
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.
Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.
What we call art would seem to be specialist artifacts for enhancing human perception.
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.
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.
All the new media are art forms which have the power of imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions.
If men were able to be convinced that art is a precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artist? Or would they begin a careful translation of new art forms into social navigation charts? I am curious to know what would happem 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....
Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brainwashing.
The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive.
... Their power to see environments as they really are.
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?
Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.