Marshall McLuhan on Society

"Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies."

"Prolonged mimesis of the alphabet and its fragmenting properties produced a new dominant mode of perception and then of culture."

"We are as numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture."

"Manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication as performance."

"Scribal culture could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by typography."

"The hot radio medium used in cool or nonliterate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment."

"There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures."

"The comic strip: upholder of Homeric culture."

"The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community."