Marshall McLuhan on Humor

"Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously."

"The Chinese used the intervals between things as the primary means of getting 'in touch' with situations."

"Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity."

"Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on."

"A fixed point of view becomes possible with print and ends the image as a plastic organism."

"Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition."

"The city no longer exists except as a cultural ghost for tourists. Any highway eatery with its TV set, newspaper and magazine is as cosmopolitan as New York or Paris."

"Non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training."

"The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived with the figure minus ground."

"The twentieth century encounter between alphabetic and electronic forces of culture confers on the printed word a crucial role in staying the return to “the Africa within."

"Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement."

"We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation."

"Marx shared with economists then and since the inability to make his concepts include innovational processes. It is one thing to spot a new product but quite another to observe the invisible new environments generated by the action of the product on a variety of pre-existing social grounds."