The potential of any technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors...Computer are still serving mainly to sustain precomputer effects. Marshall McLuhan More Quotes by Marshall McLuhan More Quotes From Marshall McLuhan A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it. Marshall McLuhan transcribingtypewritersmean Primitivism has become the vulgar cliché of much modern art and speculation. Marshall McLuhan vulgarmodernart 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. Marshall McLuhan alphabethemisphereculture Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies. Marshall McLuhan classroomagencytoday 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. Marshall McLuhan fellowshostileyears The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy. Marshall McLuhan mistakeknowledgemoving Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brainwashing. Marshall McLuhan principlesnoiseway Positively, the effect of speeding up temporal sequence is to abolish time, much as the telegraph and cable abolished space. Of course, the photograph does both. Marshall McLuhan spacephotographdoe 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. Marshall McLuhan blockcommunicationmoving A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new. Marshall McLuhan readingsuccessfulbook 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. Marshall McLuhan plotconsciousliterature The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations. Marshall McLuhan interfacesvillagesituation A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence. Marshall McLuhan bulbsenvironmentlight In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses. Marshall McLuhan labsbusinessideas The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention. Marshall McLuhan environmentalfieldsattention Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech. Marshall McLuhan patternsmetaphorspeech The circuited city of the future will not be the huge hunk of concentrated real estate created by the railway. It will take on a totally new meaning under conditions of very rapid movement. It will be an information megalopolis. Marshall McLuhan movementrealcities When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result. Marshall McLuhan anxietytechnologylong Our motor car is our supreme form of privacy when we are away from home. Marshall McLuhan privacycarhome 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. Marshall McLuhan faithfulone-dayreflection
