Marshall McLuhan on Knowledge

"Rabelais offers a vision of the future of print culture as a consumer's paradise of applied knowledge."

"The levelling of inflexion and of wordplay became part of the program of applied knowledge in the seventeenth century."

"I heard what you were saying. You - you know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing."

"War has become the environment of our time if only because it is an accelerated form of innovation and education."

"Man in the electronic age has no possible environment except the globe and no possible occupation except information-gathering."

"We live invested in an electric information environment that is quite as imperceptible to us as water is to fish."

"Youth instinctively understand the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth."

"Typography as the first mechanization of a handicraft is itself the perfect instance not of a new knowledge, but of applied knowledge."

"A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various externalizations of our senses."

"Applied knowledge in the Renaissance had to take the form of translation of the auditory into visual terms, of the plastic into retinal form."

"When you move into a new area, a new territory and learn a new language, the language is not a new subject, it is an environment, it is total."

"Formal cause, as logos, incorporates the patterns of side-effects as part of essential nature: tetrads restore poesis and the making process to the study of artefacts."

"The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property."

"The sheer increase in the quantity of information movement favoured the visual organization of knowledge and the rise of perspective even before typography."

"New media are new languages, their grammar and syntax yet unknown."

"Privacy invasion is now one of biggest knowledge industries."

"The invention of typography confirmed and extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly repeatable “commodity,” the first assembly-line, and the first mass-production."

"The ways of thinking implanted by electronic culture are very different from those fostered by print culture. Since the Renaissance most methods and procedures have strongly tended towards stress on the visual organization of knowledge."

"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."

"There is nothing willful or arbitrary about the Innis mode of expression. Were it to be translated into perspective prose, it would not only require huge space, but the insight into the modes of interplay among forms of organisation would also be lost. Innis sacrificed point of view and prestige to his sense of the urgent need for insight. A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding. As Innis got more insight he abandoned any mere point of view in his presentation of knowledge. When he interrelates the development of the steam press with 'the consolidation of the vernaculars' and the rise of nationalism and revolution he is not reporting anybody's point of view, least of all his own. He is setting up a mosaic configuration or galaxy for insight … Innis makes no effort to "spell out" the interrelations between the components in his galaxy. He offers no consumer packages in his later work, but only do-it-yourself kits..."