Marshall McLuhan on Nature

"Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information."

"The logos of creation, 'And God Said ...' formed the basis of Christian interpretation of the 'Book of Nature.'"

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

"Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration."

"Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology."

"The celebrated earthy tactility of Rabelais is a massive backwash of receding manuscript culture."

"The “natural magic” of the camera obscura anticipated Hollywood in turning the spectacle of the external world into a consumer commodity or package."

"Since Sputnik, the earth has been wrapped in a dome-like blanket or bubble. Nature ended."

"Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment."

"The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature."

"There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew."

"One touch of nature makes the whole world tin."

"Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of communal interdependence."

"We now live in a technologically prepared environment that blankets the earth itself. The humanly contrived environment of electric information and power has begun to take precedence over the old environment of "nature." Nature, as it were, begins to be the content of our technology."

"Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener. That is the immediate aspect of radio. A private experience. The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber."

"Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a manmade environment that ends "Nature" and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed. Shakespeare at the Globe mentioning "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players" has been justified by recent events in ways that would have struck him as entirely paradoxical. The results of living inside a proscenium arch of satellites is that the young now accept the public spaces of the earth as role-playing areas. Sensing this, they adopt costumes and roles and are ready to "do their thing" everywhere."