Marshall McLuhan on Technology

"In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession."

"The unique innovation of the phonetic alphabet released the Greeks from the universal acoustic spill of tribal societies."

"Dantzig explains why the language of number had to be increased to meet the needs created by the new technology of letters."

"When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized."

"The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb."

"At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology."

"The potential of any new technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors."

"The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world."

"Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual."

"Great ages of innovation are the ages in which entire cultures are junked or scrapped."

"If the criminal appears as a nonconformist who is unable to meet the demand of technology that we behave in uniform and continuous patterns, literate man is quite inclined to see others who cannot conform as somewhat."

"Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. One of the merits of motivation research has been the revelation of man's sex relation to the motorcar."