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Wednesday, June 9, 2021
Photo source: Wikimedia Commons, Library Archives of Canada
Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) was a Canadian philosopher best known for his analysis of media. Wikipedia says,
"McLuhan proposed that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study - popularly quotes as 'the medium is the message'. McLuhan's insight was that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself." (Wikipedia: Marshall McLuhan, 8.17.21 UTC 21:29)
The rest of this post is some quotes from McLuhan.
"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, 1967)
"A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various externalizations of our senses." (The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962)
"It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action." (Understanding Media, 1964)
"Writing turned a spotlight on the high, dim Sierras of speech; writing was the visualization of acoustic space. It lit up the dark." (Counterblast, 1969)
"Gutenberg made all history available as classified data: the transportable book brought the world of the dead into the space of the gentlemen's library." (Counterblast, 1969)
"The portability of the book, like that of the easel-painting, added much to the new culture of individualism." (The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962)
"Print, in turning the vernaculars into mass media, or closed systems, created the uniform, centralizing forces of modern nationalism." (The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962)
"The most human thing about us is our technology." (Man and the Future of Organizations, 1974)
"When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result." (Location, 1963)
"We are as numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture." (Understanding Media, 1964)
"Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind." (Quoted in The Book of Probes: Marshall McLuhan)
