“Since neolithic times men have regarded their technologies as mere neutral aids to already established activities. The results have been rather like the disappearance of fingers in a buzz saw whose teeth are invisible because of the speed of rotation.”
M McLuhan
1964 speech
“Sarnoff’s notion that technologies are neutral tools is bunk. Technologies are like cannibals that eat alive all existing populations. The first person to get swallowed is the consumer. There’s nothing neutral about any technology”
McLuhan
Forbes Magazine
March 15, 1967
Optimists often point to vinyl as proof that obsolete media can rise again.
As a format of media consumption, vinyl is slow and fairly demanding. In this respect, vinyl is remarkably similar to books.
Read the full story:
https://t.co/jSyujQTtkE
“Yes, the slang thing is of great interest to media students, because every new medium brings a world of slang with it, because slang is after all perception.
Slang is a way of seeing and feeling the world in its more recent development.”
M. McLuhan
w/ Eric McLuhan
1971
“Going along with the total and, perhaps, motivated ignorance of man-made environments, is the failure of philosophers and psychologists in general to notice that our senses are not passive receptors of experience.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘Identity, Technology, and War’
1970
“Ezra Pound was not the first, and certainly not the only, person to think of poetry as news, but he did say that it is news that stays news.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘Voices of Literature’ I
1964
“It seems necessary in a world where everything happens at once and in which the daily environment is alive with messages and meaning that the training of perception becomes the necessary work of any school.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘Education in the Electronic Age’
1967
“I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.”
Marshall McLuhan
@McLinstitute
“They work by dislocation of attention. That is why new styles are necessary for perception. The function of the arts is training in perception. It is not instruction. It is to train your ability to see and use your senses.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘Education in the Electronic Age’
‘67
“Western man, from Plato to the present, seems to have opted for a transportation theory of communication in which data move, or are moved, from one point to another, leaving both sender and receiver unaltered by this transaction.”
Marshall McLuhan
The Medium is the Message
1973
“As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art.”
Marshall McLuhan
‘The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment.’
November 1965