Marshall McLuhan on Life

"The reduction of the tactile qualities of life and language constitute the refinement sought in the Renaissance and repudiated now in the electronic age."

"Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture."

"There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation."

"Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual."

"At the very high speed of living, everybody needs a new career and a new job and a totally new personality every ten years."

"The images of mankind have become the most basic thing about them. And they're all software, and disembodied."

"The medieval student had to be paleographer, editor, and publisher of the authors he read."

"The “interface” of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism – a formula for blitz and metamorphosis."

"African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film."

"When Coleridge said that all men are born either Platonists or Aristotelians, he was saying that all men tend to be either acoustic or visual in their sensory bias."

"Literacy affects the physiology as well as the psychic life of the African."

"Bacon's Adam is a medieval mystic and Milton's a trade union organizer."

"The manuscript shaped medieval literary conventions at all levels."

"The audience, as ground, shapes and controls the work of art."

"One of the things that happens at the speed of light is that people lose their goals in life. So what takes the place of goals and objectives? Well, role-playing is coming in very fast."

"Each new technology is a reprogramming of sensory life."

"Our senses are not receptors so much as reactors and makers of different modalities of space. Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things, but the very life of things in the mind."

"We have become like the most primitive Palaeolithic man, once more global wanderers, but information gatherers rather than food gatherers. From now on the source of food, wealth and life itself will be information."

"I am not a "culture critic" because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world."

"The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography. The printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, created extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly."

"When we invent a new technology, we become cannibals. We eat ourselves alive since these technologies are merely extensions of ourselves. The new environment shaped by electric technology is a cannibalistic one that eats people. To survive one must study the habits of cannibals."

"Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception."

"Jacques Ellul observes in Propaganda: When dialogue begins, propaganda ends. His theme, that propaganda is not this or that ideology but rather the action and coexistence of all media at once, explains why propaganda is environmental and invisible. The total life of any culture tends to be "propaganda", for this reason. It blankets perception and supresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom."