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
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.
All media are extensions of some human faculty- psychic or physical.
Our permanent address is tommorrow.
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.
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.
Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.
Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.
Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.
Affluence creates poverty.
The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.
The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
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.
The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
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.