The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan

The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects
Marshall McLuhan, Quention Fiore
Gingko Press, 2001  (ISBN 1-58423-070-3)     from [here]

"The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies

in which they occur." - A. N. Whitehead

pg. 8 - 'The medium, or process, of our time - electric technology - is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted.'

'Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.'

'The alphabet, for instance, is a technology that is absorbed by the very young child in a completely unconscious manner...'

'Words and the meaning of words predispose the child to think and act automatically in certain ways. The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement.'

'Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions. Our "Age of Anxiety" is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools - with yesterday's concepts.'

pg. 10 - 'Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasing old categories - for probing around. When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised, put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result.'

pg. 26 - 'All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.'

'The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.'

'ALL MEDIA ARE EXTENSIONS OF SOME HUMAN FACULTY - PSYCHIC OR PHYSICAL'

pg. 44 - 'The dominant organ of sensory and social orientation in pre-alphabet societies was the ear - "hearing was believing." The phonetic alphabet forced the magic world of the ear to yield to the neutral world of the eye. Man was given an eye for an ear.'

'Western history was shaped for some three thousand years by the introduction of the phonetic alphabet, a medium that depends solely on the eye for comprehension. The alphabet is a construct of fragmented bits and parts which have no semantic meaning in themselves, and which must be strung together in a line, bead-like, and in a prescribed order.'

'Its use fostered and encouraged the habit of perceiving all environment in visual and spatial terms - particularly in terms of a space and of a time that are uniform'

pg. 48 - 'Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.'

'The goose quill put an end to talk. It abolished mystery; it gave architecture and towns; it brought roads and armies, bureaucracy...'

pg. 50 - 'Printing, a ditto device, confirmed and extended the new visual stress. It provided the first uniformly repeatable "commodity", the first assembly line - mass production.'

'It created the portable book, which men could read in privacy and in isolation from others. Man could now inspire - and conspire.'

'Like easel panting, the printed book added much to the new cult of individualism. The private, fixed point of view became impossible and literacy conferred the power of detachment, non-involvement.'

pg. 68 - 'Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. The groundrules, pervasive structure, and over-all patterns of environments elude easy perception. Anti-environments, or countersituations made by artists, provide means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly.'

'The interplay between the old and the new environments creates many problems and confusions. The main obstacle to a clear understanding of the effects of the new media is our deeply embedded habit of regarding all phenomena from a fixed point of view.'

'Print technology created the public. Electric technology created the mass. The public consists of separate individuals walking around with separate fixed points of view.'

pg. 76 - 'When information is brushed against information...the results are startling anfd effective. The perennial quest for involvement, fill-in, takes many forms.

pg. 88 - 'The poet, the artist, the sleuth - whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely "well-adjusted", he cannot go along with currents and trends.'

'A strange bond often exists among anti-social types in their power to see environments as they really are.'

pg. 92 - 'Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment - of what's really going on - affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions.'

'Older societies thrived on purely literary plots. They demanded story lines. Today's humor, on the contrary, has no story line - no sequence. It is usually a compressed overlay of stories.'

pg. 93 - 'Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental.'

'Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society.'

'The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment.'

'The ground rules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly and unaware. The "expert" is the man who stays put.'

pg. 94 - 'Our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old.'

'These are difficult times because we are witnessing a clash of cataclysmic proportions between two great technologies. We approach the new with the psychological conditioning and sensory responses of the old.'

'The clash naturally occurs in transitional periods. In late medieval art, for instance, we saw the fear of the new print technology expressed in the theme The Dance of Death. Today, similar fears are expressed in the Theater of the Absurd. Both represent a common failure: the attempt to do a job demanded by the new environment with the tools of the old.'

pg. 117 - 'Most people find it difficult to understand purely verbal concepts. They suspect the ear; they don't trust it. In general we feel more secure when things are visible, when we can "see for ourselves"'

'All kinds of "shorthand" systems of notation have been developed to help us see what we hear.'

'We employ visual and spatial metaphors for a great many everyday expressions. We insist on employing visual metaphors even when we refer to purely psychological states, such as tendency and duration.'

'We are so visually biased that we call our wisest men visionaries, or seers!'

pg. 122 - "Authorship" - in the sense we know it today, individual intellectual effort related to the book as an economic commodity - was practically unknown before the advent of print technology.'

'Medieval scholars were indifferent to the precise identity of the "books" they studied. In turn, they rarely signed even what was clearly their own. They were a humble service organization.'

'The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. Mechanical multiples of the same text created a public - a reading public. The rising consumer-oriented culture became concerned with labels of authenticity and protection against theft and piracy.'

'The idea of copyright - "the exclusive right to reproduce, publish, and sell the matter and form of a literary or artistic work" - was born.'

'Xerography - everyman's brain-picker - heralds the times of instant publishing. Anybody can now become both author and publisher. Take any books on any subject and custom-make your own book by simply xeroxing a chapter from this one, a chapter from that one - instant steal!'

'As new technologies come into play, people are less and less convinces of the importance of self-expression. Teamwork succeeds private effort.'

pg. 142 - 'The environment as a processor of information is propaganda. Propaganda ends where dialogue begins. You must talk to the media, not to the programmer.'

pg. 157 - 'You see, Dad, Professor McLuhan says 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?'

"It is the business of the future to be dangerous."

- A. N. Whitehead