Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone's" Essential McLuhan"
Anansi,1995 has been made available to The McLuhan Foundation in
digital form thanks to Eric McLuhan's kindness and foresight.
	The quotes that I will be sending out over the next week or
two are themselves taken from a much larger selection
that appears in their book. I am hopeful that this will
incline people to purchase the book itself and 
secondarily to find value in the mini-selection. 
	I will soon send out the table of contents 
of the book.

 George Sanderson	


Short Quotes#1




MEDIA AS  THE NEW NATURE

		

The new media are not ways of relating us to the old  
real world; they are the real world and they reshape what 
remains of the old world at will. 
 1969

The word  medium was Latin for  public. There not being 
any reading public before printing, men perhaps tended to 
think of readers at large as a kind of scattering of 
currency  a  medium in that sense.  1973

The news automatically becomes the real world for the TV 
user and is not a substitute for reality, but is itself 
an immediate reality.  1978

We must substitute an interest in the media for the 
previous interest in subjects. This is the logical answer to the fact 
that the media have substituted themselves for the older world. Even if 
we should wish to recover that older world we can do so only by an 
intensive study of the ways in which the media have swallowed it.  1956


AS NEW LANGUAGES . . .

Today we are beginning to realize that the new media are not just 
mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages 
with new and unique powers of expression.  1957

Ads, comics, and movies are not codes in North America but basic 
languages. That we have not yet begun to teach their grammars is as 
natural as it is for pre-literate man to ignore the written or visual 
mode of his language. Grammar comes from the Greek  written. And 
education would seem to involve the translation of experience into a new 
mode.  1960

It is the framework that changes with each new technology and not just 
the picture within the frame.

The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go 
of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.

Gramophone and movies were merely the mechanization of speech and 
gesture. 
Each new technology creates an environment that is itself regarded as 
corrupt and degrading yet the new one turns its predecessor into an art 
form. 		 	 1964

The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the 
deliberate lie. The form and tone of some press styles may make the very 
concept of truth irrelevant. The most urgent and reliable facts presented 
in this way are a travesty of any reality. 			 1955


The effects of new media on our sensory lives are similar to the effects 
of new poetry. They change not our thoughts but the structure of our 
world.  1969