A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Found 265 quotes (104 duplicates hidden).
The familiar idea of “making the news” now yields to making the world itself. For the best part of a century we have been programming human consciousness with retrievals and replays of the tribal unconscious. The complementary of this process would seem to be the “natural” program for the period ahead: programming the unconscious with the recently achieved forms of consciousness. This procedure would evoke a new form of consciousness radically different from former consciousness. Everybody becomes a voluntary participant in creating diversity without loss of identity. Man is the content of the environment he creates, whether of “hardware” or software,” whether of consciousness of unconsciousness. There is therefore no technical alternative to “humanism” even though for many this would include the divine grace of the superhuman. INNOVATION IS OBSOLETE, SO IS OBSOLESCENCE, AS INFORMATION SPEED-UP TRANSFORMS MAN AND HIS WORLD INTO ART FORM. AFINN-AGAIN-ARRAY-SURRECTION!
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 297
Year: 1972
All contemporary decision making confirms the habits of the past in reacting with a futile attempt to adjust. Reaction is the age-old attempt to adjust to the old, which is seen as “present” and “future.” At instant speeds all reaction and adjustment are inevitable, too late to be relevant. To keep up we must be far ahead.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 216
Year: 1972
↪ Also at #6066
As we approach “instant” speeds of information, we have no choice but to anticipate the pattern of change itself.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 216
Year: 1972
↪ Also at #996
The entire use of yes-no bit programming is from the alphabetic modes of Western civilization. But many people look to the computer to bypass present forms of human action and limitation. Yet, even the written and printed word, it might be argued, has helped us to surpass ordinary human scale.
“The Future of the Book” (1972), in Understanding Me, p 176
Year: 1972
Since television America came of age. Americans got a lot of trouble, but since television they are not afraid of serious culture. Television trains everyone. It has deepened the American psyche. America is no longer that visually dominated culture. It used to be concerned with the outside appearance and the packaging. Now it does not care. The visual world is no longer dominant in America. You can tell that the moment you see the kids, dressed in their crazy way. They are not dressed for the eye.
“Interview with J.P.M. van Santen in Toronto”, October 25, 1972, Transcript, p 2
Year: 1972
Chapters:
America, North America | Television
↪ Also at #6739
Since the United States is the only country in history to begin with print technology as its guideline and pattern for all its establishments, it is, of all countries, the least able to confront the advent of electric technology, which contradicts every facet of specialist rational order.
Take Today; The Executive As Dropout, (1972), p 272
Year: 1972
Chapter:
America, North America
The plain fact is that the only way to keep up with enemies or rivals is to be ahead of them – by sheer design.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 156
Year: 1972
Drawn to McLuhan #3
The old mythology is disintegrating; to survive is to remythologize. The radical common denominator is that we accept change as a normal condition. Accelerando, ergo sum.
“Myth”, in Popular Culture Mosaic (1972), p 25
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Anticipating Change
My own approach, following Harold Innis, is a transformation theory, thus homeostasis of the perceptual factors in a rapidly changing environment requires much redistribution of emphasis among the senses. For example, a blind or deaf person compensates for the loss of one sense by a heightening of activity in the others. It seems to me that this also occurs in whole populations, when new technologies create new sensory environments.
Quoted in “McLuhan Delivers His Message,” by Bella Strumbo, Los Angeles Times, February 28, 1972; later quoted in W. Terrence Gordon’s Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding (1997), p 150
Year: 1972
In every situation, metamorphosis depends on the frozen arrest of an action. The diehard, paradoxically, can be read as an epitath on his own tombstone.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 5
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Anticipating Change | Transform
↪ Also at #7066
Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature.
Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (1972), p 11
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Anxieties Caused By Change
In the same way. Socrates founded dialectic by writing. Those pre-Socratics had no systems and no dialectic and committed their insights to aphorisms which are figures without ground and without context. I am looking into the kinds of supposed context which have been attributed to the pre-Socratics, and I suspect that they are non-existent.
Letter to Thomas Langan, March 2, 1972, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 451
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Aphorism
It is the distinction of the "artist" in any field that he commands this power to convey the effects of things when the ordinary person is merely numbed or robotized by things. The fascination of child behavior and child art is the same.
Take Today; The Executive As Dropout, (1972), p 89
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Art, Artists
This process transforms the torture of work into the refined torture of art - the primal curse laid on man: he will earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. Today the sweat is empathy, and the self-knowledge that is the most awful form of torment is awareness of one's own sordid motives manifested in their consequences.
Take Today; The Executive As Dropout, (1972), p 166
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Art, Artists
We are polluting Art as fast as we are tidying up Nature.
Take Today; The Executive As Dropout, (1972), p 166
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Art, Artists
The more you know about the public, the more they take over the show.
“The lost Marshall McLuhan tapes” interview with Peter C. Newman, 1972, published in Macleans, July, 2013, p 51
Year: 1972
The absolute monarch is powerless opposite the superior knowledge of the bureaucratic expert.
McLuhan quoting Max Weber in Take Today, with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 129
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Authority of Knowledge
Francis Bacon, by the way, had a theory that the human mind is not a mirror but an “enchanted glass” full of imposture and delusion resulting from the impact of art and technology on society.
Letter to Michael Macoby, August 9, 1972
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Bacon, Francis
There are many ways in which the book and literate values are threatened by the mere fact of the electric service environment.
“The Future of the Book” (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 175
Year: 1972
When millions of volumes can be compressed in a matchbox space, it is not merely the book but the library that becomes portable.
“The Future of the Book”, 1972, in Understanding Me (2002), p 174-175
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Book | Predictions
↪ Also at #5647
What Illich fails to see is that when the answers are outside, the time has come to put the questions inside the school rather than the answers.
“The End of the Work Ethic” (1972), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 203
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Breakdown as Breakthrough
Our motor highways…are centres of programmed mayhem, set at statistical levels of psychic tolerance.
“Abortion in Today’s World” (1972), typescript, p 5
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Car
…in the new quantum mechanics, the term interface implies a resonant interval in which there are no connections in matter as understood in the new physics, but there is a perpetual resonating interval, between particles, or among particles, and this resonance is the interface and it is in this interval of resonance that the action takes place, it leads on to those basic matters about our own world of the drop out, because the dropout is a person who experiences the need to set up more space between himself and things, he wants more room, he wants an interface, he wants a kind of resonant dialogue, he wants to rap, to chat and empathize with everybody about everything and this constitutes an interface of change. In dialogue people undergo change, it isn't just the passing of gossip back and forth, but it's a kind of interrelating by which people feel they are change, they are getting with it, they are getting involved, they are participating. All of these things that seems to me profoundly relate to the Rosary and to the church and the mystical body which is also amazingly, instant, surround, interface at source of change, renewal and of endless source of nourishment to everybody.
“A Matter Of Faith”, Part 1, TV episode of Father Peyton's Family Theatre (1972); Youtube; transcript: 8.26
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Catholic Church | Dialogue
↪ Also at #1487
New means create new goals and erase old ones. During speed-up means and goals merge in process.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 194
Year: 1972
When processes moved up to electric speeds, it became obvious that “everything causes everything” – that for every cause there are many effects, just as every effect has many causes.
“The Almighty User”, in Chicago Sunday Sun-Times, Midwest Magazine, May 23, 1972, p 28
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Causality
…let me report two major breakthroughs which I have written about in a short essay on Causality for Melvin Kransberg. The essay has created a peculiar problem for Kransberg, by the way. Perhaps you can help here, too. He sent it out to several of his editors and friends for comments by way of creating a symposium…. The theme of our essay on Causality [written with Barrington Nevitt] is quite simply that effects precede causes. Except to the visually lineal man of hardware industrial background, this proposition is self evident, but it happens to be true of any form of hardware as well as more cultural things. The effects of the telephone became environmentally felt long before the instrument of the telephone was invented and this is equally true of the steam engine and the motor car and the airplane.
Letter to Ruth Nanda Anshen, January 26, 1972 (LAC)
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Causality
There is a celebrated limerick on the subject of life in the electric age. It was made, I’ve heard, by biologist Buller of the University of Manitoba. It goes:
There was a young lady name Bright Who moved with the quickness of light She went out one day In a relative way And returned the previous night.
Professor Buller did not invent electricity, nor did he create the problems that attend the angelic Miss Bright, who still moves at electric speed, namely the speed of light. McLuhan and Nevitt did not invent the telegraph or radio or telephone or television, all of which enable the population of the world to behave exactly in the instantly relative manner of the irrepressible Miss Bright.
“The Electric Age”, letter by McLuhan to the Editor of Globe and Mail, 1972, published on an unnumbered page
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Causality
ESP is old hat when effects precede causes.
Take Today: the executive as dropout with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 193
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Causality
IN THE WORLD OF ELECTRIC INFORMATION, ALL CENTERS OF POWER BECOME MARGINAL.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972) p 13; this passage in the book is all caps
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Centralized / Decentralized
The day you enter Grade One, you know more than your grandfather did when he graduated.
Undated Monday Night Seminar, (circa 1972), from a surviving audio recording; transcript, p 1
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Change
Today, the satellite environment has scrapped the entire nature process of the planet. This was not the result of an inadvertent blooper but of a relentless pressure for more speed of information. The resulting increase of environmental information has in effect scrapped everything known as human organizations while at the same time retrieving innumerable forgotten forms of human organizations from the remote and prehistoric past. The things we assumed as the ground for human existence have simply been cancelled.
Take Today: the executive as dropout with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 224
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Change
At electric speed communication tends to bypass the organization chart. The big decisions are no longer made at the top, they are made by many subordinates, all over the place. The amount of power at the top is changing very fast. This is not the result of democratic theory. It is the result of speeded up communication. So the kids now make the decision on the future of clothing, of consumer goods education. They have become a big consumer element so they can determine policy even in education.
“Interview with J.P.M. van Santen”, Toronto, October 25, 1972, Transcript, p 3
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Change
At electric speeds every type of human enterprise is pushed to its limit. At this point the return becomes a transformation or metamorphosis…
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 176
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Chiasmus, Flips, Reversals
The role of popular culture -- its aesthetic base-- is mild catharsis. Nostalgia plays a large part. "Pastimes are past times." This phrase of James Joyce puts it in a chiasmus or complementarity.
“AESTHETICS”, in the unpublished “Popular Culture Mosaic” (1972), p 9
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Chiasmus, Flips, Reversals
Every process pushed far enough tends to reverse or flip suddenly. This is the chiasmus pattern, perhaps first noted by ancient Chinese sages in I Ching: The Book of Changes.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 6
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Chiasmus, Flips, Reversals
The corresponding flip from objective to immersion techniques in politics presents itself in the form of a political shift from parties and policies to images and services. That is, political parties and their explicit policies have simply been obsolesced by the images presented by the party leaders on the one hand, and the services taken for granted by the community, regardless of the party that happens to be in power, on the other hand.
"The End of the Work Ethic" (1972) in Media Research (1997), p _
Year: 1972
The old organization chart that belonged to the old hardware world of the 19th century has simply flipped upside down with the speed of electric information and so the little slots that the execs used to fit into in the business world no longer hold them.
“The Planet as Art Form”, appearance on The David Frost Show (1972), ”McLuhan Speaks” transcript, p 1
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Chiasmus, Flips, Reversals
Do you know how to tell an authentic, good Chinese vase? I was told and tried it and it works. You hold the vase in your hand at arms length for a minute or two, and if it’s good it will begin to hum with the circulation of your blood. A bad vase won’t hum.
Quoted in “Kandy Kolored Massage: Marshall McLuhan and Tom Wolfe at U.S.C.’s Arts Festival” by Loiwell Ponte, (1972), UPS, p 35
Year: 1972
Chapter:
China, Chinese
Nudity is not nakedness, since the nudes expects to be seen whereas the naked person does not. In fact nakedness is the "put off" of all power and dignity and social being. This fact draws attention to clothing as equipment and technology and power.
“International Motley and Religious Costume” (1972), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 76
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Clothing and Nakedness
The Emperor’s clothes are corporate social services whose character is concealed by their way of involving everybody, thus making themselves invisible. Such “corporate clothing” is familiar in phrases such as “the King’s highway,” “the King’s English,” “the King’s justice,” “the King’s pess,” etc. These corporate clothes, or social vestitutres, are vast environmental weaponry such as enlists the total social energy of a whole population.
“International Motley and Religious Costume” (1972), p 2
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Clothing and Nakedness
Words that came to mind as you were saying, these last bits, is that we live in the world of the instant replay. Around the planet all the events are not only being recorded but replayed and the amazing thing about the replay is that it offers the means of recognition. The first time is cognition, the second time is recognition and the recognition is even deeper. I think that perhaps what you are interested in with regard to the Rosary has a lot to do with the replay
“A Matter of Faith - Father Peyton's Family Theatre - Part 1” (1972), transcript: 03:07 ff
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Cognition and Recognition
The reader is hypocrite in the very act of putting on the author’s poem as his mask, for in reading the poem he is perceiving the world in a very special way, using what another poet, S.T. Coleridge, called "a willing suspension of disbelief” for the moment.
“At the Moment of Sputnik” (1972), in Marshall McLuhan: the Man and His Message (1989), p 78
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Coleridge
Far from being normal, successful communication is a rarity. It requires not only repetition of a common language, but also demands participation of both author and audience in the process of remaking from their old components a pattern that only the author may have perceived. Communicating the new is a miracle.
Take Today: the Executive as Dropout with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 142
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Communication | Playfulness
↪ Also at #5437
Nothing has its meaning alone. Every figure must have its ground or environment. A single word, divorced from its linguistic ground, would be useless. A note in isolation is not music. Consciousness is corporate action involving all the senses (Latin sensus communis or "common sense" is the translation of all the senses into each other). The "meaning of meaning" is relationship. When young activists harp on "relevance," they are asking for interface or the abrasion of dialogue; they are ECO-sounding to discover where it's at.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 3
Year: 1972
The emperor and clown are complementary. The clown is the emperor’s private self seeking contact with the people and situations that he embodies corporately in his role. The clown is free to spoof the emperor, to test his moods for the benefit and entertainment of the court. The clown is a type of audience researcher or consultant, just as our audience researchers and consultants have become the clowns of our culture. Today we see the emergence of a new type of executive who can switch roles from clown to emperor to probe the environment through his awareness.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 202
Year: 1972
Ultima Laputa: Where Men Are Faceless Tentacles of Computers
The new Utopians [as described in a 1965 book of that title by Robert Boguslaw] are concerned with non-people and with people substitutes. Their planning is done with computer hardware, system procedures, functional analysis, and heuristics.. . . The theoretical and practical solutions they seek call increasingly for decreases in the number and in the scope of responsibility of human beings within the operating structures of their new machine systems.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 129
Year: 1972
↪ Also at #7414
ULTIMATE TWO-BIT WITTEDNESS
WHEN MORE AND MORE IS DONE WITH LESS AND LESS
The new man of two words, a hippie: "Hi! Bi!"
In The Social Impact of Cybernetics, Robert Theobald predicts that
"computer systems, not men, will first realize humanity's old dream of a
universal language, and the subtleties and nuances of human thought will
risk being mediated through the restricted and standardized symbols of
computer communication." All "scientific" and "economic" measurements of human psychic and social processes are rooted in human preferences.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 112
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Computer
…computers will demonstrate that [mankind] can afford nothing short of the best, which is to make spaceship earth a successful environment for man.. . . Our greatest problem is the educational problem of getting man to realize in time what his problems are, and what the most effective priorities may be.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, pp 118-119
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Computer
Today's executive is called upon not only to cope with standard accounting procedures but also to know when to use statistical methods, operations research, cost-benefits analysis, budget plans, computer programs, and general systems science. System designers are constantly developing new techniques for reducing more and more industrial production and human organization processes to bits, the ultimate yes or not-yes choices of Computers. Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly. Computers need only programmed instructions and codified inputs to handle sequential data and analysis to yield information more rapidly than people. But no computer "know-how" can transform breakdowns into breakthroughs without human insight. Knowing what to do is still a human monopoly. Only people can make sense by dislocating unfamiliar situations
into meaning.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 109
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Computer
While artists like James Joyce can make a resonating universe with two words, computer programmers try to match universes of human knowledge and perception to the two-bit wit of their machines.
Take Today: The Executive as Dropout with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 110
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Computer
This extension of consciousness has already begun with the computer and has been anticipated in our obsession with ESP and occult awareness.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 14
Year: 1972
The “egghead” type of intellectual authority is frequently challenged in the business creed, where it is claimed that “the businessman’s practical wisdom is superior to the academician’s unworldly theorizing. And so it went until the computer reversed the priorities of experience and knowledge.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 49
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Computer
Incidentally, I am not a fan of De Chardin’s. I find the evolutionary stuff very tiresome. The idea that anything is better because it comes later, is surely borrowed from pre-electric technologies. By the way, there is one thing that is enormously faster than light or electricity, and that is thought. That is why pattern recognition is only possible to the human mind.
Letter to Tom Easterbrook, 1972
Year: 1972
The Gutenbeg technique of mechanizing handicrafts by minute fragmentation of "time and motion" became the ground plan of the entire American "experiment in democracy." Exactly repeatable tasks enabled the least skilled workers to get jobs at once. The Gutenberg principle of mechanization by fragmentation and specialism was extended as much to the Constitution as the ballot box and the box office. This principle was introduced equally into education and into the market place.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 44
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Democracy
When you are "on the air," you are everywhere at once. This is a power beyond that of the angels, according to Thomas Aquinas, for they can only be in one place at a time.
“The End of the Work Ethic” (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 201
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Discarnate
…when you go on the telephone, you are transformed, you become instantly available to your friend in Chicago, or he becomes here instantly to talk to us in Toronto, you can talk to Tokyo and to Chicago and to New York simultaneous and this gives you a sort of dimension of an angel, an almost preternatural being, a disembodied spirit. In the electric age man, becomes a kind of disembodied spirit, I don't think our institutions have any way of coping with this new dimension of man, the angelic discarnate man of the electric age, who is always in the presence of all the other men in the world.
“Father Peyton’s Family Theatre (1972)”, Televised interview by Father Patrick Peyton, Transcript, p 3
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Discarnate
J.P.M. VAN SANTEN: You think the executive is being dropped out?
MARSHALL MCLUHAN: Yes, I think he is being pushed out by the speed. Anybody can pick up the telephone and talk to anybody. Everyone’s business has a huge information environment around it. The market used to be the environment. The world of prices of dealing, stocks, everything. The market is the figure, but no longer the environment. Outside the marketplace there is a new kind of information, the satellite world. The real spin on the business world today is information, it is not money.
“J.P.M. van Santen Interview”, Toronto, October 25, 1972, transcript, p 3
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Dropout
As soon as the planet went inside a man-made environment [Sputnik in orbit], the occupants of the planet began to hum and sing the ecological theme song without any further prompting.
“The End of the Work Ethic”, 1972, pages 196-197
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Ecology
The future of government lies in the area of psychic ecology and can no longer be considered on a merely national or international basis.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 227
Year: 1972
Ecology is the simultaneous awareness of the interplay of the total field of processes.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 223
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Ecology
People panic when invited to alter habitual ways of seeing, and looking, and hearing, and feeling. They are quite right in supposing that an effort is being made to alter their identity. The teacher is satisfied with nothing less than that.
Letter to Michael Barkway, Editor of Financial Times, Sept. 11, 1972 (LAC)
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Education | Surveillance
↪ Also at #6595
[To a participant in a Monday Night Seminar] But as I said, you will never have as much leisure, during any working day of your life, as you have in school.
Undated Monday Night Seminar, 1969-1972, found on YouTube, “Marshall McLuhan 1969-1972, Full Recording of a Monday Night Seminar, Toronto University,” transcript, 26:04.
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Education
It is now possible to make the schools not a place for packaged information, but a place for dialogue and discovery.
“The End of the Work Ethic”, 1972
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Education
The “right” word is not the one that names the thing but the word that gives the effect of the thing.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 142
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Effect
At electric speeds nobody makes decisions but everybody becomes participant in a complex situation for which he can take no responsibility whatever.”
The End of the Work Ethic, 1972, in Understanding Me, 2003, p 200
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Electric, Electronic
It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 11
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Electric, Electronic | Figure/Ground
↪ Also at #2295
These characteristics do not develop in the cultural milieu of electric sound and information, for the acoustic world, like the "auditory imagination" defined by T. S. Eliot, is not private or civilized but tribal and collective.
“The Future of the Book” (1972), in Understanding Me, 2003, pp 178-179
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Eliot, T.S.
↪ Also at #2001
For various reasons, which we can discuss at length sometime, it is impossible to have a music that is not based on the rhythms of a particular tongue of speech. Speech is the “hidden” ground for the music as figure in any culture whatever. There are specific and complex reasons why the oral tradition of American Southern speech constitute the only possible ground for jazz and rock. Some of these reasons include the fact that English is almost the only language in the world that has actual feet and not mere syllables. Equally basic is the relation of English to the metropolitan patterns of industrial sound. New technological sounds and patterns are processed through the speech in order to become “music.” To people who do not understand this complex of speech technology factors, it must seem very mysterious that Chinese and Norwegian alike are compelled to sing Rock in English rather than their own tongues.
Letter to John Cage, September 13, 1972, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 456
Year: 1972
Environments work us over and remake us. It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 90
Year: 1972
The Scientific Systems of the Technical Age have become Art Forms.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 216
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Environment
Today, when the entire environment is directly created by man himself, the bond between man and things takes on a much greater scope and intensity of resonance.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 97
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Environment | Extension Theory
↪ Also at #2213
New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 47
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Environment
With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 11
Year: 1972
By involving all men in all men, by the electric extension of their own nervous systems, the new technology turns the figure of the primitive society into a universal ground that buries all previous figures.
Take Today with Berrington Nevitt (1972), p 25
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Fashion | Retribalizing
↪ Also at #6192
…the figure/ground interplay of man and his artifacts, as each remakes the other…
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 13
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Figure/Ground
In all patterns, when the ground changes, the figure too is altered by the new interface.
“The Future of the Book” (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 180
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Figure/Ground
Affluence creates poverty, literally. Without wealth you cannot have poverty. You can have hardship, you can have stress, but you cannot have poverty. It is a figure-ground relationship. Canada is like a poor man sharing an apartment with a rich man. We are rich enough, but compare with the U.S. we are poor, you see.
J.P.M. van Santen Interview, Toronto, October 25, 1972, Transcript p 6
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Figure/Ground
Machiavelli is now as obsolete as Gutenberg from whom he stems. “Old Nick” was among the first to observe the psychic and social fracturing that resulted from the alphabet (“alforabit”) when speeded up by the new press.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 18
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Fragmentation
…the future of the future is the present.
Take Today, with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p.134
Year: 1972
The future of the book raises the question of whether men can ever program their corporate social lives in accordance with any civilized pattern by any other means than that of the printed book.
“The Future of the Book” (1972), in Understanding Me, (2003), p 176
Year: 1972
There is no part of the world in which we do not participate, whether we know it or not. And there is no part of us which is not equally invaded by everything in the world.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 239
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Global Village
I do not know if we have enough energy to feel deeply about everything in the world.
van Santen interview, 1972, p 3
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Global Village
By mobility the number of people who now meet every day for the one and only time in their lives is far greater than the population of the world itself. These brief encounters create the illusion of growing density of population. The same flow can creep into any form of statistic. One recalls the case of ht statistician who drowned in a steam whose average depth was three feet.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 111
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Global Village
Half the world today is engaged in keeping the other half "under surveillance". This, in fact, is the hang-up of the age of "software" and information. In the preceding "hardware" age the "haves" of the world had kept the "have-nots" under "surveillance". This old beat for flatfoots has now been relegated to the world of popular entertainment. The police state is now a work of art, a bureaucratic ballet of undulating sirens. That is a way of saying that the espionage activities of our multitudinous man hunters and "crediting" agencies are not only archaic, but redundant and irrelevant.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, pages 25-26
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Hardware / Software | Sports and Games
↪ Also at #6573
…we live in an electric simultaneous world, where most of the relationships between men are now invisible.
"Televised interview by Father Patrick Peyton”, on the program, Father Peyton’s Family Theatre (1972), Transcript, p 2
Year: 1972
Well, the ideal, the visual world as compared to the world of resonance. The visual world offers evidence of a very different kind, that toward which you can feel an inclination of attention you can have, you can focus your attention on it we speak of having, you're conscious of visual life vocalized on concentrate upon an object, this gives you a point of view, now you can have a point of view about anything, you can see, but you cannot have a point of view about something you hear, especially something you overhear. There's a mystery there that we are much more powerfully involved in what we overhear then in what we hear. But in the world of resonance, man somehow, or other, becomes completely involved, he is not involved in the visual world as much, because this offers a means of detachment, you can stand back, you can look at it from different distances and so on. The world of resonance requires a complete involvement and consent on the part of the listener.
“A Matter of Faith”(TV Interview), Father Peyton’s Family Theatre, 1972; Transcript, p 5
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Hemispheres of the Brain
The replaying of past events in “realistic” ways began with the power of print to retrieve ancient authors and historians. Our power to reconstruct the past has grown steadily with media enlargement, till Hollywood made such enlargements a major feature of this century.
“The Almighty User,” Chicago Sunday Sun-Times, ___, 1972, p 28
Year: 1972
Chapter:
History
We begin to live a kind of Dante-esque vision that merges all pasts and presents.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 191
Year: 1972
Chapter:
History
↪ Also at #2708
“History as she is harped” has a totally different character from written history or literature. There is no chronology in Homer, no perspective, and no retrospect. It’s all now.
“Yestertomorrow of the Book” (1972), p 20
Year: 1972
Chapter:
History
The police state is now a work of art, a bureaucratic ballet of undulated sirens. That is a way of saying that the espionage activities of our multitudinous man hunters and “crediting” agencies are not only archaic, but redundant and irrelevant.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 26
Year: 1972
As Eric Havelock explains in Preface to Plato, the private identity of Western man appears to be grounded in the peculiar effects of the phonetic alphabet in abstracting private from corporate identity.
Letter to Rollo May, December 14, 1972, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 458
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Identity
When the oral and tribal Greek was subjected to the detribalizing action of the visually oriented alphabet, his new private identity was suddenly in violent interface with the old corporate, or incestuous, identity.
Letter to Rollo May, December 14, 1972, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 458
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Identity
Information overload equals pattern recognition.
“Media Ad-vice,” Introduction to Subliminal Seduction by Bryan Wilson Key (1972)
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Information Overload | Oft-Cited Quotes
↪ Also at #5175
The much greater electric speed-up of today enables us to shift from information overload to pattern recognition, from experience to knowledge, and from reaction to anticipation.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 64
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Information Overload | Information Warfare
↪ Also at #3001
The kind of understanding of social process which Innis achieved is not shared by other historians. Innis is unique in having been the first to apply the possibilities of pattern recognition to a wired planet burdened by information overload.
Foreword to H.A. Innis’s Empire and Communication, 1972 edition, in On the Nature of Media (2016), pp 194-195
Year: 1972
From the moment of Hiroshima and The Bomb we had positive proof that information as such had become the new sinews of war.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 150
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Information Warfare
↪ Also at #2977
Whereas visual man had dreamed of distant goals and vast encyclopedic programs of learning, electronic man prefers dialogue and immediate involvement. Since nothing on earth can be distant at the speed of light, electronic man prefers the inner to the outer trip and the inner to the outer landscape.
“At the Moment of Sputnik” (1972), in MM: The Man and His Message (1989), p 72
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Inner/Outer | Speedups
↪ Also at #6531
He changed his procedure from working with a “point of view” to that of the generating of insights by the method of 'interface.' By contrast, a “point of view” is merely a way of looking at something. But an insight is the sudden awareness of a complex process of interaction
Forward to H.A. Innis’s Empire and Communication, 1972 edition, in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 194
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Innis, Harold Adams
Innis recognized that the Newtonian hierarchy of natural events had crumbled. He was not under its spell in the least, because he saw what had to be done was a great leap forward in understanding of organizing human affairs. Approaching the past dynamically as a dramatic action with a world cast, Innis naturally saw history as a mass of ruins and misconceived enterprises. In his power to reveal the pattern of massive imperial events, Innis is a kind of deus ex machine unmasking the actors. This power to expose the hidden motivations of great corporate actors, such as the city-state of Roman or Babylonian bureaucracies, almost puts Innis in the role of a satirist. One no sooner uses the word than its appropriateness to Innis becomes evident.
Forward to H.A. Innis’s Empire and Communication, 1972 edition, in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 194
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Innis, Harold Adams
The reason for the “difficulties” which many people encounter in reading Innis arises from his participative concern with processes rather than a point of view. As he became better acquainted with the historical processes released by technical innovation, he was less and less inclined to moralize. He came to see historical Fate as the motivated refusal to recognize the patterns of culture already within the various culture. He tackled these matters as practical problems to be solved by direct observation and analysis, developing his perceptual tools by means of historical comparison and contrast. The resulting awareness leaves as little room for moralizing as it does for a point of view.
Forward to H.A. Innis’s Empire and Communication, 1972 edition, in On the Nature of Media (2016), pp 194-195
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Innis, Harold Adams
[Innis] had discovered a means of using historical situations as a lab in which to test the character of technology in the shaping of cultures. Innis taught us how to use the bias of culture and communication as an instrument of research. By directing attention to the bias or distorting power of the dominant imagery and technology of any culture, he showed us how to understand cultures.
Introduction to 1972 edition of Innis’s Empire and Communication, p viii -- entitled the opening chapter of The Bias of Communication, “Minerva’s Owl”
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Innis, Harold Adams
↪ Also at #3019
Until the work of Harold Innis, I have been unable to discover any epistemology of experience, as opposed to an epistemology of knowledge.
Letter to Tom and Dorothy Easterbrook, August 1, 1972, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 455
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Innis, Harold Adams
The paradox by which depression comes from inflation and speed-up, and the paradox by which extreme monopolies of knowledge through specialism flip into old-fashioned feudalism in the organization of the community of learning – all these contradictions and conflicts are not only seen by Innis, but can also be deciphered by the reader if he troubles to acquire the multilingual grammar and syntax of the technologies that invest us.
Forward to H.A. Innis’s Empire and Communication, 1972 edition, in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 203
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Innis, Harold Adams | Paradox
↪ Also at #5209
Innovation is obsolete. So is obsolescence, as information speed-up transforms man and his world into art form.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 297
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Innovation | LOM 2 - Obsolesce
↪ Also at #3365
The art and science of this century reveal and exploit the resonating bond in all things. All boundaries are areas of maximal abrasion and change. The interval or gap constitutes the resonant or musical bond in the material universe. This is where the action is. To naive classifiers a gap is merely empty. They will look for connections instead of bonds. They will seek the authors' points of view instead of their probing of processes. Such readers will expect value judgments instead of understanding. With medieval dread they abhor vacuums. But by directing perception on the inter-faces of the processes in ECO-land, all gaps become prime sources of discovery.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 3
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Interval
↪ Also at #3081
When everybody fits in, the result is total connectedness or the absolute logic that is rigor mortis. Only the flaws or misfits create the needed gap or interval for resonance and “interface” and change or transformation through dialogue.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 270
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Interval
The gap is where the action is is now acknowledged as the basis of chemical and physical change. At first, however, the gap spurred the archaeologists and anthropologists to world-wide explorations.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), pp 60-61
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Interval
The interval or gap is necessary to any practical action. The gap is where the action is. "Ask the man who owns one". The artist and engineer exist to create the right gaps and to avoid unfunny connections.”
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 81
Year: 1972
↪ Also at #2264
The price exacted of the twenty centuries [for reversing the trend of specialism] is a return to involvement in the most primitive modes of human consciousness.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 204
Year: 1972
[The Japanese] do things very thoroughly you know, when they approach a problem. They do not ask what is the answer, they ask what is the question. When you have good questions you do not have the answer, but twenty answers, all different, all good and hence the tremendous creativitity of the Japs. We make the mistake of looking fo the answer, instead of looking for the process, that gives the questions. They study the proess whatever it is. That is, if your problem is in education so you study the learning proess, you do not ask what should we be teaching. That is the answer. How can we use the learning process to read or to produce many answers.
Interview by J.P.M. van Santen, Toronto, October 25, 1972, Transcript, p 1
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Japan, Japanese
[Of hyper-educated, jobless young people] While fighting what they have become, they increasingly become what they fight.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 287
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Jobs
The Protestant work ethic, as characterized by private goal-seeking and self-advancement is meaningless in a world of electric information.
“The End of the Work Ethic” (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 187
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Jobs
The name of Benjamin Lee Whorf is associated with this approach in linguistics. Instead of approaching language as a vehicle for transporting data, he regards each language as a unique and infinitely complex mode of encoding or apprehending the world. Language becomes a total encounter with being.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 177
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Language
We live in worlds that burrow on each other. We burrow and borrow and barrow (or dump) our trash and treasures in an endless ballet of making and unmaking and remaking. [Those ballet steps constitute the first three laws – ed.]
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 105
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Laws of Media | Tools We Shape, Reshape Us
↪ Also at #7003
Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance. The book never had it so good. But it is no longer constitutive of the culture we live in. The book will abound and superabound in the next few decades because it is obsolete. Obsolescence is not extinction, it's superabundance.
“Theatre and the Visual Arts: a Panel Discussion”, in Yeats Studies: An International Journal, Issue 2 (1972), p 135
Year: 1972
Chapter:
LOM 2 - Obsolesce
Prominence is the harbinger of obsolescence.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 234
Year: 1972
Chapter:
LOM 2 - Obsolesce
The Sputnik event was another thing altogether which simply obsolesced the planet itself as nature disappeared into an art form.
The End of Work Ethic, 1972, in Understanding Me (2003), p 200
Year: 1972
Chapter:
LOM 2 - Obsolesce
[After the car] The horse returned on a much greater scale as sport and entertainment. The car is already becoming an art form in the same mode of obsolescence. The car is now becoming costume.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 248
Year: 1972
Chapter:
LOM 2 - Obsolesce
The mystery of retrieval of ancient forms amidst innovation has been universally manifested in the recovery of the Middle Ages in many of its forms by the young TV generation. More potent still, there is the drive back to the "cottage economy" under the impulse of computer technology.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 167
Year: 1972
Chapter:
LOM 3 – Retrieve
In this province aerial photography recently showed there are 250,000 lakes without a name... We have a new Dept. of Toponomy, "name-calling." Experts try to find names for these lakes. They are going around to talk to the Indians. "What do you call this lake?" This is one of the amazing things of our new technology. Every time anything new happens, it brings back something that is very old.
Van Santen interview (1972), p 5
Year: 1972
Chapter:
LOM 3 – Retrieve
When audience participation becomes too extensive, the villains on trial flip into public heroes because the audience quickly identifies with them, especially when they are men who are carrying out robotlike activities which necessarily resemble those of the average audience.
“The End of the Work Ethic”, 1972, in Understanding Me, 2003, p 193
Year: 1972
The genuine fake has become the real McCoy.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 79
Year: 1972
It may indeed prove true that the service environments created by the electric media are so extensive and inclusive that their users become natural monarchs, if not tyrants, who will brook no interference from other media. In electric surrounds the user as content can only experience rivalry in the form of static or short circuit.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 147
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Linear and Nonlinear | User as Content
↪ Also at #7228
Nevitt and I have done a paper on Causality in which we explain why effects always precede causes in the actual developmental order. Naturally, for the visual man, necessity means not only a chain of events, but a one-way sequence. The moment you flip out of that rut into awareness of environmental structures it becomes evident that cause and effect are not all of one type at one time. One student was talking about Freud’s work and pointed out that in Freud’s world it was the discovery that inputs do not match outputs (my old SI/SC) that resulted in everybody being neurotic.
Letter to Tom Easterbrook, February 14, 1972
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Linear and Nonlinear
AT ELECTRIC-INFORMATION SPEEDS ART AND SCIENCE AND NATURE CONVERGE THROUGH UNDERSTANDING MEDIA.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p148; capital letters in the original.
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Living Unity
Today the business of business is becoming the constant invention of new business.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 104
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Management | McLuhanisms & Zingers
↪ Also at #4329
In a fat corporation the oily executive rises to the top.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 194
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Management
As oral resonance erodes the boundaries of the old economics, turning the planet into a single Echoland, a word now makes the market.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 82
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Management | McLuhanisms & Zingers
↪ Also at #4213
People of promise, and promising enterprises, like promissory notes, have become inseparable from the promises of promotion and advertising itself. Money in turn is a promise to pay promises, and the plausible con-man has returned as the stand-in for the traditional gentleman.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 79
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Management | Money
↪ Also at #4760
To say that the executive has to be pragmatic does not say anything. It is like saying that the executive has to be an executive. He is a figure in a ground that is changing very rapidly.
J.P.M. van Santen Interview, Toronto, October 25, 1972, transcript, pp 3-4
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Management
To keep up with we must be far ahead. It would have been proper to say “ahead with the poets and the artists,” if they had not become so eager to adjust to the consumer mores. Not they are what we have to adjust to. Whereas the arts used to be navigational, the role of the arts can no longer be the same in the satellite age, when the Earth has become an art form itself.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 216
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Management
Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 92
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Management | McLuhanisms & Zingers
↪ Also at #4122
The small demi-mask worn by the participant in a masquerade is a "put on" of the group.
“International Motley and Religious Costume” (1972), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 75
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Masks
[In their book 1967 book The Year 2000] Kahn and Wiener express all the warm human understanding and perception of most science fiction. Such merely quantitative projections have no human content whatever. Even as probes they are manifestations of human ignorance and insensibility. It says much for the desperate state of human values that quantifiers and planners of this ilk should be taken seriously. Until humanists have translated their projections into creative social dialogue, this kind of two-bit language can only eviscerate what remains of an embombers' world—awaiting its turn in the crematorium.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 134
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Mastering Technology | Dropout
The conventional historian writing of "the impact of printing" has merely told us the amount of printing and the numbers of new books and readers. Such merely quantitative reporting is matching rather than making, and simply ignores what really happened. lnnis carefully avoids matching one cause against another effect and insists on making sense of the processes released by the new structures.
Foreword to Harold A. lnnis, Empire and Communications, 1972, in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 200
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Matching and Making
Some of my fellow academics are very hostile, but I sympathize with them. They’ve been asleep for 500 years and they don’t like anybody who comes along and stirs them up.
“The Lost Marshall McLuhan Tapes,” (Recovered 1972 interview) by Peter C. Newman, in Macleans, July 16, 2013
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Hostility to McLuhan | McLuhan on McLuhan
↪ Also at #2740
At instant speeds the abiding war is the war of icons and images, achieved by alliances and misalliances in a sequence of unholy deadlocks.
Take Today; The Executive As Dropout, (1972), p 156
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
Tomorrow is Our Permanent Address.
Take Today; The Executive as Dropout with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 224
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
Cat-gut and cat-calls cum Gregorian. The mass gets longer, limper, lumpier.
Diary Entry May 21,(1972) Diary, quoted in Philip Marchand, McLuhan the Medium and Messenger (1989), p 206
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
The telegraph, telephone, radio, and teletype have caused the dis- appearance of physical space and national and cultural boundaries, and have restored the most primal conditions of primitive Christianity. At the same time, this instantaneous character brings down an avalanche of historical, bureaucratic confusion upon the new oral church. The electric technology that abolishes central bureaucracy and organization also retrieves the entire past of the church—oral, written, bureaucratic, and historical.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 191
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
…much of the complaint about the rosary is repetitive, is precisely, replay and it is a perpetual deepening, not a superficial treatment at all. But there is in the replay, a deeper awareness of the pattern and of the events that have taken place, the pattern of events, the process and so, replay offers a deeper level of awareness than the first play and I think the Rosary is a perpetual way of deepening our awareness and the repetitions are really very close to the world of resonance…
“Televised interview by Father Patrick Peyton”, on Father Peyton’s Family Theatre, 1972, Youtube, transcript, p 2
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
I myself cannot think of anything catastrophic or traumatic about my own relation to the Church, it is been to me a steady source of nutrition, a study source of strength a steady and unremitting source of simple fundamental nourishment, I think of the church as an all nourishing mother and you never you don't need any one kind of nourishment, you need many kinds and so my own, as I say, relation to the church, has been a very steady matter of constant appeal for daily nourishment and this is where to me the church is the obvious and irreplaceable fact and I've never had a great deal of concern about the dogmatic problems or about the theological problems and these seem to me to be taken care of quite naturally by the steady flow of nourishment.
“Televised interview by Father Patrick Peyton”, on Father Peyton’s Family Theatre, 1972; transcript, pp 6-7
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
…why, as a student of literature and the arts, I became aware of the enormous role that the [Catholic] Church had played in underpinning these great human activities over the centuries. I was aware that the Church had always been on the side of art and intellect and that the effects of the Church therefore were everywhere for men to see and admire, but the causes remain hidden.
“Televised interview by Father Patrick Peyton”, on Father Peyton’s Family Theatre, 1972, Transcript, p 6
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
I became aware that if you're really going to test the reality of a church you had to test it on its own ground and the church, as a ground, demands that we approach it by prayer and I simply decided to meet that need of prayer as an approach to the church and simply to ask “show me”, is it true? Just show me. And the evidence came unexpectedly and from many quarters and unmistakeably and I think that, it might be a rather interesting scientific experiment for any non-believers, they're called, to simply get down on his knees for a few hours every week and demand that he be shown the reality of this unknown thing and it doesn't depend, anybody will soon discover, it does not depend upon concepts, theories, ideas, it is a thing with a life that is available to all who want to share in that life but it must be demanded. Seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you, but you have to knock and you have to knock pretty hard.
Televised interview by Father Patrick Peyton, Father Peyton’s Family Theatre, 1972, Transcript, pp 6-7
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
New means create new goals and erase old ones.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 194
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
The diehard, paradoxically, can be read as an epitath on his own tombstone.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 5
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
IMITATION: THE SINCEREST FORM OF BATTERY.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 51. The original is all caps.
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
At electric speeds of information, mankind now moves through a century of growth and experience every decade.
Commencement Address, U. of Western Ontario, 1972, typescript, p 1
Year: 1972
Paradox is the technique for seizing the conflicting aspects of any problem.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 106
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
Paradox coalesces or telescopes various facets of a complex process in a single instant.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 106
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
To keep up we must be far ahead.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 234
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
Whereas convictions depend on speed-ups, justice requires delay.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 94
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
↪ Also at #4241
However, to live in the present, or to take today now, involves acceptance of the entire past as now, and the entire future as present.
“The End of the Work Ethic” (1972), in Media Research (1997), p 103
Year: 1972
Chapters:
McLuhanisms & Zingers | Predictions
↪ Also at #5672
Science fiction doesn't really measure up to the everyday reality because the real has become fantastic.
“The End of the Work Ethic” (1972), in Media Research (1997), p 103
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
“Proof" of sanity is available only to those discharged from mental institutions.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 8
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
Muskie, what a horrible name for a candidate. Politicians do not understand media effects; none do; yet we've played with it and let it take us over…
“Kandy kolored message”, in International Times (1972), p 35
Year: 1972
Chapters:
McLuhanisms & Zingers | Names, Naming
↪ Also at #4907
Obsolescence is not extinction, it's superabundance.
“Theatre and the Visual Arts: a panel discussion”, in Yeats Studies: An International Journal, Issue 2 (1972), p 135
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
The fact becomes apparent today when there is no more geography in the world as far as verbal intercommunication is concerned.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 191
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
When war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 211
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
Food for the mind is like food for the body; the inputs are never the same as the outputs!
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 137
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
To be uncritically involved in doing what everyone else is doing is the accepted human use of human beings.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 235
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
"Hardware" thinking persists in a "software" world, driving secrecy and security measures to comic lengths:
TOO HOT TO HANDLE
BURN BEFORE READING
TOP SECRET. WHEN YOU GET THIS, DESTROY YOURSELF.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 91
Year: 1972
Information as such had become the new sinews of war.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 150
Year: 1972
Chapters:
McLuhanisms & Zingers | War
↪ Also at #7395
Frederick Winslow Taylor made himself famous by his time-and-motion studies and scientific management. Like any other avant-gardist, he had one foot firmly planted in the past.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 257
Year: 1972
Chapters:
McLuhanisms & Zingers | Rear View Mirror
↪ Also at #6022
Government had begun in a modest way as the figure of the helmsman. The ship represented the entire human community. Today the rudder has become much larger than the ship.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 217
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 37
Year: 1972
Chapters:
McLuhanisms & Zingers | Rear View Mirror
↪ Also at #6042
The big committee doesn’t make decisions. It makes recommendations.
Interview with Robert Fulford, from the “Lost McLuhan Tapes,” originally done in 1972 but published in Macleans Magazine July 16, 2013
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
MEANS BECOME ENDS FOR THE BUREAUCRAT
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 194 [Capitals in the original]
Year: 1972
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
With telephone and TV it is not so much the message as the sender that is “sent.”
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 223
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Media
It is the psychic mechanism of this sort [a new, invisible environment giving sharp relief to an older environment] that nearly all business enterprises are conducted in terms of yesterday’s breadwinners. The 10% of the events in the business that cause 90% of the events is the invisible environment area. Yet it is the 10% area that is the area of opportunity and new potential.
“The Future of Objectives, in Popular Culture Mosaic (1972), p 2
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Media Reprocess Media
When the cinema and gramophone and radio and TV became new environmental services, the traditional book began to be read by a completely different kind of public. If Gutenberg created a new kind of human being with new perception and new outlook and new goals, the electric age of radio and video has perhaps restored a public with many of the oral habits of the pre-Gutenberg time.
“The Future of the Book” (1972), in Understanding Me, p 180
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Media Reprocess Media
[T]he market... has become increasinely diaphanous as information and credit replace specie and bullion.
“Yestertomorrow of the Book” (1972), p 16
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Money
If the GNP has become an obsolete tool, it is another way of saying that it has just begun to penetrate the entire system. It has become the national icon.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 234
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Money
Radio was inseparable from the rise of jazz culture, as TV has been inseparable from the rise of rock culture.
Item for Encyclopedia Universalis, 1972, p 2 of typescript
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Music
Bad news, paradoxically, is very encouraging stuff to read and advertising is very discouraging. So, in order to have lots of ads, they have to have tremendous quantities of bad news to offset the threatening effect of advertising.
Foyle interview (1972), transcript, p 13
Year: 1972
Chapter:
News
↪ Also at #5083
The familiar idea of “making the news” now yields to making the world itself. For the best part of a century, we have been programming human consciousness with retrievals and replays of the tribal unconscious. The complementary of this process would seem to be the “natural” program for the period ahead: programming the unconscious with the recently achieved forms of consciousness.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 297
Year: 1972
Chapter:
News
We have created new environments of invisible power, embedded in such things as the bomb, the pill, the tube. Unprepared to encounter psychic consequences of these environmental powers, we are baffled by the occult obsession of young and old, ignorant and learned. Such cults are the new frontier of popular culture.
“Environment”, in Popular Culture Mosaic (1972), p 3
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Occult
…just as printing returned a social interest in Greek paganism during the Renaissance, so today electronic media is returning social interest to the occult, the magical, the irrational...
“KANDY KOLORED MASSAGE-Talking to Tom Wolfe and Marshall McLuhan”, in International Times (1972), p 35
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Occult
Electricity brought back the occult.
“Marshall McLuhan interviewed by J. P. M. van Santen in Toronto, October 25 1972. (Transcription of tape recording part of the conversation.)”, p 5
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Occult
This pattern of incongruity had occurred with Gutenberg revival of antiquity, as it is now occurring with the electric revival of primitive occultism.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 47
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Occult
Those who "play it by ear" are instantly aware of the effects of change. The same electric technology that has retrieved ESP and the occult for many levels and areas of American life has turned the kids away from "moreness," from glossy consuming to homespun and "camp" and "found" art.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 100
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Occult
Much of what we call the occult or ESP today is simply the recovery of awareness of nonvisual ground for the figures and configurations of our visual civilization.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 115
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Occult
Today, electronic retrieval of the occult horoscopic and the old movie stars alike is a built-in feature of the information environment.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 122
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Occult
By the way, there is one thing that is enormously faster than light or electricity, and that is thought. That is why pattern recognition is only possible to the human mind.
Marshall McLuhan
Letter to Tom Easterbrook, 1972
Letter to Tom Easterbrook, 1972
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Oft-Cited Quotes
Americans are alone on this planet in going outside for privacy and inside for community. All other peoples awhatever, before and since, have gone and now go outside for community and inside for privacy. It is to this pattern of relation to space and to one another that has permitted North Americans to avoid class structure such as characterize all other people.
“Letter to Henry Ford II” (May 23, 1972), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Outside to be Alone
I had been pointing out to him our unique North American pattern of going outside for privacy and inside for community, the reverse of all other cultures in the world, and then happened to bring up this matter of Western refusal to consider the effects of technology on psyche.
“To Edmund Carpenter” (January 26, 1972), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 450
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Outside to be Alone
Paradox is the technique for seizing the conflicting aspects of any problem. Paradox coalesces or telescopes various facets of a complex process in a single instant. Our fathers sometimes encountered paradox in the jocular form of the “Irish Bull”:
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 106
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Paradox
Paradoxically, when there are many readers, the author can wield great private power, whereas small reading elites may exert large corporate power.
“The Future of the Book” (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 179
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Paradox
It is a world in which the vision of Edgar Allan Poe and the work of Sherlock Holmes merge to become a new kind of work. It is a kind of aesthetic work of pattern recognition far removed from the Protestant work ethic of goal-seeking. Today the hunter, the engineer, the programmer, the researcher, and the aesthete are one”
“The End of the Work Ethic” (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 199
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Pattern Recognition
Unlike the old specialism, contemporary forms of human employment demand the creative powers of design through pattern recognition and inclusive social awareness.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 230
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Pattern Recognition
Whereas science links the present to the past via concept, art leaps from the present to the future via percepts. Concepts isolate figures, while percepts relate figures and grounds as interplay.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 123
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Percept
Many of the basic percepts that are so effectively put in play in the perceptual training procedures of A. J. Kirshner came to attention in the educational practices of Maria Montessori.
Foreword, in Training that makes sense (1972), p 5
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Percept
The effect of satellites is the conversion of the planet into a global theatre that demands spectacular programming beyond anything conceived by the old Hollywood. The global theatre demands the world population not only as audience but as cast of participants.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 18
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Planet, Nature
Shakespeare at the Globe had seen all the world as a stage, but with Sputnik, the world literally became a global theater with no more audiences, only actors.
“The End of the Work Ethic” (1972), in Understanding Me, p. 197
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Planet, Nature
The services rendered to ecology by the dinosaur suddenly ended when the dinosaur achieved vasta bulk. As the dinosaur became an environment, he eased to accommodate to the existing world. He became pollution and ended. Today the truck and the motor car have long passed the point where their services exceed their disservices in the Western world.
“High-Rise Inverts Everybody into Nobody,” essay written for the NY Times, never published; 1972 typescript, p 1
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Planet, Nature
↪ Also at #5414
We are entering a time of dialogue and heightened human awareness that plagues many as the specter of "pollution." The etymology of this word (from Latin pro-luere: wash forth) reveals a hidden process that is entirely applicable to the present situation: pushed to extreme, dilution becomes pollution. It is like the rich Texan: whenever he cashed a check, the bank "bounced."
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 5
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Planet, Nature
The new expert, along with the old executive, has been swept away in a flood of comedies. New environments of information and enterprise have revealed the contours of these obsolescent types, even as the satellite has created a sudden and universal awareness of "pollution”.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 23
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Planet, Nature
Inflation Is Pollution: The Dilution of Promises
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 79
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Planet, Nature
The Effluent Society: Pollution of Human Satisfactions
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 101
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Planet, Nature
Whereas mere headings were once specialist, mechanical catchalls, they now become the avenues of insight into complex organic processes. An obvious example is pollution. It has always been a major feature of any environment. At high information speeds it presents a Gorgon-like and intolerable visage. It is no longer a category or nuisance, but a process that turns societies to stone.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 106
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Planet, Nature
Experience is play, and meaning is replay and re-cognition.
“The Quantum Leap from Science to Art”, in Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 142
Year: 1972
Poe had confronted the poetic process in a way entirely consistent with the new electric speed of events and reporting. He simply pointed to the possibility of writing poetry backwards, starting with the effect desired and then proceeding to discover the "causes" or means for the desired effect.
“At the Moment of Sputnik” (1972), in Marshall McLuhan: the Man and His Message (1989), p 73
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Poetry
The old and new journalism, corresponding to the old nineteenth-century hardware
and the new electric software and the old and new politics, match these accordingly.
“The End of the Work Ethic” (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 202
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Politics and Government
The corresponding flip from objective to immersion techniques in politics presents itself in the form of a political shift from parties and policies to images and services.
“The End of the Work Ethic” (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 203
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Chiasmus, Flips, Reversals | Politics and Government
↪ Also at #1082
The revolution I have been describing in reporting and in politics is the theme of a book called Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich.
“The End of the Work Ethic” (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 203
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Politics and Government
And whereas private, Western man shuns and deplores the invasion of his privacy by the historian or by the psychologist, the tribal or corporate man feels no such reluctance in checking the psychic and social effects of technology.
“The Future of the Book�� (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 177
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Print
The need for clannish protection of information grew out of the extreme slowness of movement of such information. The diplomatic pouch has never been in a hurry.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, 92
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Print
Electrically, men are now so much closer together that we can no longer admit that there is anything that is of merely private concern.
“Private Individual vs Global Village” in Abortion and Social Justice (1972), p 245
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Privacy
Without play, there looms the shadow of madness in private as in corporate life, whence the danger of specialism and bureaucracy when the rigors of classification overlay the relaxed countenance of harmonious faculties.
“The End of the Work Ethic” (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 191
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Privacy
The keys to comprehending the data, the “keys to given,” in any headache are also the “keys to heaven”: when the hang-up is recognized as comic, it opens the door of perception that can transform all previous relationship and release tensions.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p13
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Probe
For solutions lie not outside, but inside the problems themselves. We can find them by recognizing their process patterns. Both the approach and the patterns are recurring topics of this book.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 247
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Problem Solving
The judge puts on his robes (and, in England, his wig) by way of assuming the corporate authority of the community. So bedecked, he is not a private person, and he is not allowed to speak to anybody as a private person until he has removed his costumes…The stripper puts on her audience by taking off her clothes. Thus clad, she is not a private person. Backstage, in whatever situation, she is a private person. Stripped of her audience, she is nobody.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 274
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Putting On
The wearer drops his private identity in order to assume a corporate identity.
“International Motley and Religious Costume”, 1972, in The Medium and the Light, 1999, p 75
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Putting On
Insofar, however, as this "put on" is a kind of takeover of a corporate social role, it is inevitably represented as usurpation and deprivation by those who have to forego some of their private power and function in order to make this corporate role possible.
“International Motley and Religious Costume” (1972), in The Medium and the Light, (1999), p 77
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Putting On
The religious who put on some of the available corporate powers of their society in order to function in a role are seen by many job-holders as usurpers.
“International Motley and Religious Costume” (1972), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 77
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Putting On
Spaceship earth is still operated by railway conductors, just as NASA is managed by men with Newtonian goals.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 90
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Rear View Mirror
The confusion which exists at present, as between private or corporate dress for religious, may herald the advent of a time when all religious will become the underground.
“International Motley and Religious Costume” (1972), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 77
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Religion
St. Paul's remark that faith comes by hearing would seem to have something to do with his resonance of the word, the word, the divine word, resonating in the human heart is a kind of interface which changes the human heart, and tunes in a totally new way and so, the idea of resonance rather than logical connectedness, or logical demonstration and a mere sequence of proofs one following in other rigorously, the idea of resonance as simultaneous and total and all involving, and demanding everything, but we have and in turn feeding us and feeding back to us everything we need.
“A Matter of Faith,” TV interview with Father Patrick Peyton (1972), transcript, p
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Religion
The population of the world is both the cast and content of this new theater. The repertory of the theater consists of a perpetual HAPPENING, which can include the retrieval or REPLAY of any previous happenings that men choose to experience.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p145
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Replay
Dear Miss Koenig:
May I suggest a possible title to replace [your magazine title] WEEK-END? The word RE-PLAY. This word, with all its connotations of sports and recreation, has some hidden suggestions that are quite powerful and meaningful. For example, a re-play is also re-cognition, and re-cognition, unlike cognition, is a moment of pattern recognition. That is, a moment when the meaning of experience comes home to us. Most people have experiences for which meanings are a long time in arriving. Without the RE-PLAY, the experience of the preceding week might never achieve any meaning.
Letter to Rhoda Koenig, LIFE STYLE MAGAZINE, May 30, 1972
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Replay
But the artists are the playful creative person, using all of his faculty simultaneously, he is a pleasure, he is playing and he is in a role. Now, when a person is in a role, they don't have a job, they have many jobs and to have a role is not to have a job, but to have dozens and dozens of jobs simultaneously. This calls for great flexibility and great diversity and great tolerance and great flexibility of spirit and the role player, therefore, is a very rich person and a mother's role is never, you can't prescribe it, it's totally unpredictable, she has to be many things that many times the day and so role playing, in that sense, is a world in which you have a vast repertory of parts to perform simultaneously.
Televised interview by Father Patrick Peyton, on Father Peyton’s Family Theatre, 1972, Transcript, p10
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Roles
…Latin sensus communis, or common sense [is] the translation of all senses into each other…
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 3
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Senses
Each sense actually makes its own space with its own distinctive perceptual structure. Only the visual sense is connected; all others resonate consensually.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 137
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Senses
New bricks and mortar high-rise, relics of the nineteenth century, and “Elijah” Otis, produce “instant slums” a new dimension of disservice environment on the very edge of a new frontier, the end of “real” estate.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, (1972), p 35
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Services, Disservices
During periods of rapid innovation and the consequent interplay of new and old services there is a complementary flood of disruption and disservice.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, (1972), p 60
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Services, Disservices
After increasing beyond some point, any service becomes a disservice.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, (1972), p 82
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Services, Disservices
The nose cone that had been created for a single use thus proliferated a number of other materials and processes that quickly evoked new service/disservice environments.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, (1972), p 95
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Services, Disservices
In the warfare-welfare view of the state, warfare is simply the disservice side of welfare service environment.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 173
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Services, Disservices
If there is no private independent personal substance such as has always occupied the thought of the sages, then all matters of authority and obedience are frivolous, all service and disservice indifferent and equal.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, (1972), p 263
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Services, Disservices
They were less observant of the disservice environments that accompanied their innovations.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, (1972), p 264
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Services, Disservices
MEANS CREATE ENDS FOR THE SOMNAMBULIST
ENDS CREATE MEANS FOR THE ENTREPRENEUR
MEANS BECOME ENDS FOR THE BUREAUCRAT
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 194
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Sleepwalkers | Wake Them Up!
↪ Also at #7336
In school and business and laboratory alike, the specialist cannot get into action in time to have relevance. The ground changes faster than the figure.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 104
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Specialism
[After a speed-reading of Milton’s “Paradise Lost”] And one of the boys, after reading the entire poem in seven minutes said, “I didn’t know Milton was such a great musician!” What came out of the poem at that speed was organ music. It was auditory. Read at a much slower speed Milton is a very visual poet. Read at high speed he became auditory. It’s like going through the sound barrier.
“Tuning In on Marshall McLuhan.” interview by Joseph Foyle, in This Week (Dublin, Ireland, 1972), typescript transcript, p 10
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Speech
The matrix of the family, the community, has been ripped off by new instruments of transportation, which simply eliminate the neighborliness and the natural rapport that men have with one another by proximity and daily dialogue and familiarity. It is the daily dialogue and familiarity that has been ripped off by rapid transport, so that people now go as quickly to Berlin, or to a Munich, or to Moscow, as formally they made a short journey or rather a 30 or 40 mile journey to some neighborhood on their own country. Now this has temporarily at least destroyed what we call community and so the family is left isolated, the nuclear family, stark naked unsupported by community.
Televised interview by Father Patrick Peyton, on Father Peyton’s Family Theatre, 1972; transcript, p 10
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Speedups
At instant speeds, everybody begins to live inside a 360-degree module in which every event echoes every other event back and forth at electric speeds, and all events bounce off each other creating patterns. There is one optimistic feature. The mind moves very much faster than light. Light travels to Mars in minutes. The mind can go and come back from Mars in an instant many times. The mind can actually recognize all these electric patterns as easily as it can alphabetic letters. It's very much faster than the computer.
“McLuhan Dissects the Executive” Business Week, June 24, 1972, p 118
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Speedups
What is in conflict is not human efficiency or motivation but technologies of incompatible speeds.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 222
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Speedups
The Western psyche is a fragile, specialized product of the phonetic alphabet, which stands in terror of any snooping for its credentials, whereas tribal men would welcome such study. The tribal man says, “Let’s see what will happen and then decide to stay away from it,” whereas Western man says Let’s try it anyway and see what happens.” Or again. The suddenness of the leap from hardware to software cannot but produce a period of anarchy and collapse in existing establishments, especially in the developed countries.”
Letter to Ted Carpenter, January 6, 1972, in Letters (1987), p 450
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Today’s Transition
The patterns of formerly hidden processes now begin to obtrude on every hand. Prescience, prophetic vision, and artistic awareness are no longer needed to establish an understanding of the most secret causes of personal and social processes. Mere electric speed-up makes X-ray awareness natural. Any administrator today is aware of his environment as a universal teaching machine.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p.193
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Training of Perception
[Of P.E. Trudeau] His image is all that matters. His politics have no consequences whatsoever. His image is all that remains. When he moves he changes his ground, his changes his images. Here in Toronto he is very different from being in Moscow. The game is different. Every time you move to a new ball-park it is a different ball-game.
You’ll change the rules.
J.P.M. van Santen Interview, Toronto, October 25, (1972), Transcript p 5
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Trudeau, Pierre Elliott
Truth is not matching. It is neither a label nor a “mental reflection.” It is something we make in the encounter with a world that is making us. We “make sense”
not in cognition but in recognition or re-play.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), pp 3-4
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Truth
The typewriter changed the forms of English expression by opening up once more the oral world to the writer of books.
“The Future of the Book” (1972), in Understanding Me, 2003, p 175
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Typewriter
The user is the content. The user of the clothing is the content of the clothing. The user of the poem is the content of the poem. The user of the music is the content of the music.
Van Santen interview, 1972, transcript, p 2
Year: 1972
Chapter:
User as Content
It seems necessary to postulate a profound motivation for such universal somnambulism. People in general seem to have a built-in intuition of the safe limits of their human awareness at any given time.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 192
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Wake Them Up!
The sheer method and vastness of the operation motivated this perfectly typical somnambulist. Today, the utmost degree of social fragmentation achieved by the vertical city streets of high-rise units makes it obvious that the entire social strategy is ready for reversal.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 28
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Wake Them Up!
The interface or interplay of figure and ground necessary to community, or social dialogue and diversity, are alien to their uniform concepts and blueprints. They are motivated somnambulists for whom transit is a way of life and for whom our servants, the car and truck, are left to do our "living" for us
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 33
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Wake Them Up!
World War I a railway war of centralization and encirclement. World War II a radio war of decentralization concluded by the Bomb. World War III a TV guerrilla war with no divisions between civil and military fronts.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 152
Year: 1972
Chapter:
War
War has become a useless concept, an effete category that confuses all our thinking about the new situation.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 156
Year: 1972
Chapter:
War
In Catch-22, the figure of the black market and the ground of war merge into a monster presided over by the syndicate. When war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 211
Year: 1972
Chapter:
War
Innis, in his Empire and Communication, explains how the Greeks destroyed themselves with their own alphabet… They hadn’t the wit to understand what was happening, or the courage or what not, and they simply destroyed themselves with their own writing system.
Joseph Foyle interview, in This Week (Dublin, Ireland, 1972), p 21.
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Writing
The result [of accessible Xerox) is that confidential briefing is now beginning to take an oral rather than a written form.
“The Future of the Book” (1972), in Understanding Me (2003), p 180
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Xerography
The man who stays on welfare longest is the welfare bureaucrat. He is now achieving the least with the most. In welfare, it is the unemployed WHO ARE THE EMPLOYERS, JUST AS IN ENTERTAINMENT, IT IS THE AUDIENCE WHO EMPLOYS THE PRODUCER. [Capitalizations appear in the printed book]
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 213
Year: 1972
The Negro gifts for mime and masks and ritual entertainment are now part of the largest industry in the world – show business. The hippie, by the same token, has become a hunter again. Aritistically and occupationally, he finds new affinities with the aborigines. The industrialist, no longer interested in hiring "hands," goes hunting for talents and as likely as not encounters "heads." TT 214
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 214
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Hunters of Information | Tribal Societies
The paradox is that as services for everyone become environmental, private services for anyone vanish. We return to do-it-yourself.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 216
Year: 1972
…the changeover today [is from] matching to making, from acquisition to involvement, and from job holding to role playing.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 265
Year: 1972
The effect of not having a body for most of the services in our information environment has significance which nobody has looked into at all. I would venture off-hand to say that people without bodies tend to be very weak in private identity. That a private identity tends to form in an interfacing of social surrounding. But minus a body, the social interfacing, or encounters, are very weak. Again, it is very difficult to explain why the subject has never been studied.
“Radio, Jobs, Role-Playing”, title given to an undated, recorded Monday Night Seminar circa 1969-1972, Transcript: 6:56
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Discarnate
Eliot went to England and made visible for the first time to the twentieth-century English the new world of French literary and artistic discovery. The environment of European art of the past decades had become so invisible to the English that it took this American to reveal it by his artistic activities.
“The Marfleet Lectures” , March 16-17 (1967), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 111
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Eliot, T.S.
Every time somebody thinks up an innovation, the innovation retrieves or brings back something very, very old. Electricity brought back the occult.
Van Santen Interview, 1972, p 5
Chapter:
LOM 3 – Retrieve
This question highlights the difference between exposition and exploration. Anything that I know I can explain quite simply and directly. I can package it. Nearly everything I write is concerned with areas of exploration in which I am actively engaged in discovery. That is why I say, I have no point of view.
Text of an address to the Provincial Committee on the Aims and Objectives of Education of the Schools of Ontario, on January 19, (1967), p 11. Printed as “Education in the Electronic Age,” Interchange (Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education), Vol. 1, No. 4. (1970), reprinted as Chapter 12.3 in The Best of Times / The Worst of Times: Contemporary Issues in Canadian Education. (1972)
Year: 1967
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
I make most of my discoveries while talking… Nearly every insight I’ve ever made in my life occurred to me while talking to people. In the classroom, I make more discoveries than I do anywhere else.
Undated Monday Night Seminar, recorded and available on YouTube as “Marshall McLuhan 1969-1972; full recording of a Monday Night Seminar at Toronto University”; transcript, p 17
Year: 1969
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
To keep kids from pop culture? Put the hit parade on the examination and all the comic books and all the movies and all the TV shows… and you will find a total desertion of the whole enterprise. It works for Shakespeare; why shouldn’t it work for Bonanza?
“Education in the Electronic Age” " The text of an address to the Provincial Committee on the Aims and Objectives of Education of the Schools of Ontario, on January 19, 1967. Printed as Chapter 12.3 in The Best of Times /The Worst of Times: Contemporary Issues in Canadian Education, Editors., H. A. Stevenson, R. M. Stamp, and J. D. Wilson (1972)
Year: 1967
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
High Rise Cemetery: Go halfway to meet your maker [headline, followed by] With high-rise you have Necropolis – ideally a cemetery in the sky – the only answer to which is to put the old housing into costume
“High Rise Inverts Everybody into Nobody,” DEW-Line Newsletter, 1970-1972
Year: 1970
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
It takes a lot of people to make news, one person can’t make news it takes a lot of artists, lots and lots of machinery, a lot of bureaucrats, a lot of farrago, fire-working, little typesetters and so on, masses of people to make news.
Undated Monday Night Seminar, 1969-1972, found on Youtube, labeled “Marshall McLuhan 19691972, Full Recording of a Monday Night Seminar, Toronto University,” transcript, p 16 (22:56)
Year: 1969
Chapter:
News
So it is a very good point to begin the investigation [teaching kids sex education] by simply challenging the right of that word [sex] to exist except as a classification of male and female. Otherwise it probably has no right to exist.
“Education in the Electronic Age,” Interchange (Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education), Vol. 1, No. 4. Text of an address to the Provincial Committee on the Aims and Objectives of Education of the Schools of Ontario, on January 19, 1967. Printed as Chapter 12.3 in The Best of Times / The Worst of Times: Contemporary Issues in Canadian Education. Eds., H. A. Stevenson, R. M. Stamp, and J. D. Wilson. Toronto and Montreal: Holt, Rinehart and Winston of Canada Limited, 1972
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Sex and Love
Moralizing, on the other hand, is an attitude which is easily engendered by concern with material and efficient causes and once one asks. "Who owns this newspaper?” Or "Who runs this newspaper?”, most people are prepared to make value judgments. I hope you will have a look at my latest book Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (Harcourt. Brace, Jovanovich Inc. 1972) in which I study the structural effects of electric speed in decision-making and management.
Letter to James W. Carey, 1974, in Letters (1987), p 492
Year: 1974
Chapter:
Values & Value Judgments
The police state is now a work of art, a bureaucratic ballet of undulating sirens. [His italics]
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 26