Marshall McLuhan |
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Understanding Media, by Marshall McLuhan. (to more click HERE)
Much to the chagrin of his contemporary critics McLuhan's preference was for a prose style that explored rather than explained. Probes, or aphorisms, were an indispensable tool with which he sought to prompt and prod the reader into an ''understanding of how media operate'' and to provoke reflection.
In the 1960s McLuhan's theories aroused both wrath and admiration. It is intriguing to speculate what he might have to say 40 years later on subjects to which he devoted whole chapters such as Television, The Telephone, Weapons, Housing and Money. Today few would dispute that mass media have indeed decentralized modern living and turned the world into a global village.
Digital Mcluhan: A guide to the Information Millenium, by Paul Levinson. (to more click HERE)
Marshall McLuhan died on the last day of 1980, on the doorstep of the personal computer revolution. Yet McLuhan's ideas anticipated a world of media in motion, and its impact on our lives on the dawn of the new millennium. Paul Levinson examines why McLuhan's theories about media are more important to us today than when they were first written, and why the "Wired" generation is now turning to McLuhan's work to understand the global village in the digital age. |
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IF IT WORKS,
IT’S
OBSOLETE
Marshall McLuhanisms |
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The story of modern America begins With the discovery of the white man by the Indians. |
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Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.
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Whereas convictions depend on speed-ups, justice requires delay. |
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The nature of people demands that most of them be engaged in the most frivolous possible activities—like making money. |
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With telephone and TV it is not so much the message as the sender that is “sent.” |
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We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future. |
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Spaceship earth is still operated by railway conductors, just as NASA is managed by men with Newtonian goals. |
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Invention is the mother of necessities. |
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You mean my whole fallacy’s wrong? |
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Mud sometimes gives the illusion of depth. |
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The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man. |
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Why is it so easy to acquire the solutions of past problems and so difficult to solve current ones? |
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The trouble with a cheap, specialized education is that you never stop paying for it. |
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People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath. |
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The road is our major architectural form. |
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A road is a flattened-out wheel, rolled up in the belly of an airplane. |
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Today each of us lives several hundred years in a decade. |
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Today the business of business is becoming the constant invention of new business. |
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The price of eternal vigilance is indifference. |
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News, far more than art, is artifact. |
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When you are on the phone or on the air, you have no body. |
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Tomorrow is our permanent address. |
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All advertising advertises advertising. |
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“Camp” is popular because it gives people a sense of reality to see a replay of their lives. |
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This information is top security. When you have read it, destroy yourself. |
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The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy. |
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One of the nicest things about being big is the luxury of thinking little. |
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Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions. |
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The missing link created far more interest than all the chains and explanations of being. |
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In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea of a department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses. |
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When a thing is current, it creates currency. |
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Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs. |
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The future of the book is the blurb. |
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Men on frontiers, whether of time or space, abandon their previous identities. Neighborhood gives identity. Frontiers snatch it away. |
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The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially. |
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At the speed of light, policies and political parties yield place to charismatic images. |
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“I may be wrong, but I’m never in doubt.” |
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—Copyright © 1986, McLuhan Associates, Ltd. |
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