Quotes from Essential McLuhan


BURSTING BOUNDARIES
Today the boundaries between inner and outer forces of the media are 
confused. And our four- century preoccupation with print has fixed our 
attention on so limited an aspect of the media that we find it very hard 
to release our attention to the whole range of media influence. What I 
wish to show is that today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate 
men faced with the advent of writing.  1955

The dichotomy between information and entertainment has ended.  1962

What we call entertainment at the present time is really, basically, a 
form of politics. There is really far more politics in Hollywood in the 
consumer attitudes and personal preferences and goals as set by casting 
bureaus and so on, far more political reality in the Hollywood scene than 
there ever has been in the so-called political scene. 			 1966

The media themselves are the avant-garde of our society. Avant-garde no 
longer exists in painting and music and poetry, its the media 
themselves. 			 1973




DEVELOPING THE POTENTIAL 
OF NEW MEDIA


Circuitry means that every situation must fold back into itself much in 
the pattern of cognition and its playback, which is  recognition in the 
action of human perceiving and knowing. The new technology mimes the 
prime procedure of human learning and knowing.  1968

New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older 
media. These degradations happen when new media inevitably use older ones 
as content. Using the older ones as content hastens the tidying-up 
process by which a medium becomes an art form.  1964

Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the  
content of the other, obscuring the operation of both.  1964


ENVIRONMENTS
[Environment, from the Greek, peri-vello: to hit from all sides at once]

Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the 
content totally.  1967

A prime feature of the environmental is its invisibility and unawareness. 
This seems to be involved in the very process of phylogeny. Each new 
stage of growth becomes the environment for all preceding stages. But we 
are aware only of the preceding stages, or, as it were, the content of 
the environment.  1964


We actually live in a world environment that now has the structure of our 
own subconscious lives . . .  1967

The sudden discovery of nature was made possible by the railway.

The simultaneous insists upon the harmonious.  1957

The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment 
is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of 
attention.  1967

We can always see the Emperors old clothes, but not his new ones.  1965

Electric technology offers, perhaps for the first time, a means of 
dealing with the environment itself as a direct instrument of vision and 
knowing.

While environments as such have a strange power to elude perception, the 
preceding ones acquire an almost nostalgic fascination when surrounded by 
the new. This is nowhere more evident than in the art of photography with 
its power to invest all human artifacts with the quality of art.  1967