Marshall McLuhan Speaks

Marshall McLuhan in conversation with Norman Mailer, 1968 [link]

5:13 - 'The environment is not visible. It's information. It's electronic.'

6:21 - 'The present is the enemy. The present is the - and this will delight you, Norman - the present is only faced in any generation by the artist.'

6:31 - 'The artist is prepared to study the present as his material because it is the area of challenge to the whole sensory life, and therefore it's anti-utopian. It's a world of anti-values.'

PATTERN RECOGNITION

10:25 - 'When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition - in other words, to structuring the experience. And I think this is part of the artist's world.'

10:41 - 'The artist, when he encounters the present....is always seeking new patterns, new pattern recognition, which is his task, for heaven's sake...'

11:03 - 'He alone has the sensory awareness necessary to tell us what our world is made of. He's more important than the scientist.'

The Future of Man in the Electric Age, 1965 [link]

1:40 - 'The effect of script and the ability to make inventories and collect data and store data changed many social habits and processes back as early as 3000 BC.'

'the effects of rearranging one's experience, organising one's experience by these new extensions of our powers, are quite unexpected. Perhaps one way of putting it is to say that writing represents a high degree of specialising of our powers.'

3:10 - Kermode: 'How would you describe the impact of the invention of the printing press? Give us some instances of what happened as a consequence of it.'

McLuhan: 'It created - almost overnight it created what we call a nationalism, what in effect was a public. The old manuscript forms were not sufficiently powerful instruments of technology to create publics in the sense that the print was able to do - unified, homogenous, reading publics.'

3:39 - 'Everything that we prize in our Western world in matters of individualism, separatism, and of unique point of view and private judgement - all of those factors are highly favoured by the printed world, and not really favoured by other forms of culture like radio or earlier by the manuscript.'

THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE

7:51 - '...any medium, be it radio or be it wheel, tends to create a completely new human environment.'

8:09 - 'The unawareness of the environmental is compensated for by the attention to the content of the environment. the environment as merely a set of ground rules and as a kind of overall enveloping force gets very little recognition as a form, except from the artist.'

The Medium is the Message, New York University seminar, 1977 [link]

'The ground is the message, not the content.'

'It's not what you say on the telephone, it's the fact that the telephone service is environmental.'