Marshall McLuhan - Electronic Prophet

We look at the present
through a rear-view mirror.
We march backwards
into the future.

Electric circuitry is Orientalizing the West.
The contained, the distinct, the separate -
our Western legacy-
are being replaced by the flowing,
the unified, the fused.

The story of modern America begins
with the discovery of the white man
by the Indians.

I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line,
a Distant Early Warning system that can always
relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning
to happen to it.

Art is anything you can get away with.

Historians and archaeologists will one day discover
that the ads of our time are the richest and most
faithful reflections that any society ever made
of its entire range of activities.

The new electronic independence
re-creates the world in the image
of a global village.

“The computer is the most extraordinary of man's technological clothing; it's an extension of our
central nervous system.

Beside it, the wheel is a mere hula-hoop.”

Politics offers yesterday’s answers
to today’s questions.

One of the effects of living with electric
information is that we live habitually
in a state of information overload.

There's always more than you can cope with.

I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.

The answers are always inside
the problem, not outside.

I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.

 

Canada is the only country in the world
that knows how to live without an identity.

If the nineteenth century was the age
of the editorial chair, ours is the century
of the psychiatrist's couch.

Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair
invariably emerge in periods of great technological
and cultural transition.

When you are on the phone or on the air,
you have no body.










In this electronic age we see ourselves being
translated more and more into the form of
information, moving toward the technological
extension of consciousness.









Today each of us lives several hundred years
in a decade.

If it works, it’s obsolete.

The nature of people demands that most of them
be engaged in the most frivolous possible activities— like making money.







The future of the book is the blurb.
















A point of view can be a dangerous luxury
when substituted for insight and understanding.

























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