A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Found 142 quotes (52 duplicates hidden).
I am not here engaged in trying to prove a materialist determinism of historical change, since the very idea of determinism, of lineal cause and effect, supposes a continuity and connectedness that never existed in any historical situation.
“The Hidden Information Environment”, Address to American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business, Toronto, April 15, (1977), Typescript printed in AACSB Bulletin, Vol 13, No 4, (1977) p 25
Year: 1977
Chapters:
Causality | McLuhan on McLuhan
↪ Also at #3989
The City as Classroom began out of Ivan Illich. Deschooling Society [1971] had challenged me. Illich was quite right in suggesting that we live in a new environment in which all the answers are now outside the school room and therefore he suggests, why don’t we close the schools? I say, why not put the questions in the classroom? If the answers are now outside, let’s get the questions inside and set up a dialogue between the outside and the inside. So our book The City as Classroom [1977] is really designed to get students in small teams to go outside, to study the setup of the situations that they live with every day and to discover what they’re made of. I call it the figure-ground approach — to study sort of Ralph Nader style what is developing in this environment.
City as Classroom Interview with Carl Scharfe, 1977, opening question
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Education
Even movie people don't have to study their medium that closely. Because in most movies they are very, very vague about the sort of effect they want. Big boys like Bergman are artists who understand effects. They don't just make pictures. They know the effect they want before they start. Advertising men know the effect they want before they start - they want sales. That's why the art of advertising is the greatest art form in the world. The advertisement, because of its concern for effect and its understanding of the media for the getting of that effect, is the greatest art form there is. Years from now the advertising of our century will be studied by all the great art experts. They will be saying, "Oh boy, that artist was totally unknown, anonymous and ignored all his life. He was one of the greatest guys who ever lived."
“CONVERSATION WITH MARSHALL MCLUHAN”, Howard Polskin Interview in Videography ,October (1977), p 61
Year: 1977
Chapters:
Advertising | Movies
↪ Also at #4788
Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.
“McLuhan rides again”, in Macleans, May (1977), p 23
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Advertising
In order to think, you have to forget most of what you are experiencing in order to relate it to earlier things you know, otherwise you can’t infer anything from what you are seeing. So, at the speed of light, which is now the normal speed of most information, on TV, radio, telephone and so on – at the speed of light the need to forget becomes a form of nostalgia.
Maclean’s, March 7, 1977; quoted by William Toye in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 177
Year: 1977
TV has a strange effect on the eye muscles. It tends to paralyze, or to hypnotize, the motor muscles of the eyes. So that the much television-viewing person tends to have a very poor ability to move his eyes across the printed word, or on the printed page. And he needs exercises to correct this. And the exercises need to be taken quite early while he's in his early years because otherwise they harden. But the ideal exercise for this purpose is the trampoline for loosening up the eye muscles.
Mike McManus TVO interview, 1977, transcript 15:54
Year: 1977
Chapters:
Advice | Television
↪ Also at #6756
The very word idea is indicative of the revolution in thinking that took place with literacy. This word, which is not to be found in Homeric Greek, derived from the word eidos, indicating “visual image.” The alphabet had the mysterious and unique power of separating the visual faculty from the other senses and giving dominant play to the visual.
“The Alphabet, Mother of Invention” with Robert K. Logan, in Et Cetera, 1977, p 377
Year: 1977
Drawn to McLuhan #10
In America, they tend to have these great big screens for the game itself, so that you can watch the game on television while the game is in process. This is a kind of situation that I think invites an enormous awareness of actual process, to participate in the kind of replay of the thing, while it is still ongoing. Participation in replay is a form of pattern recognition that is new in the media and has, I'd say, rather large consequences, mostly cognitive, mostly consequences that will affect our nature of our cognition and awareness and I would think entirely only in the direction of extreme self-awareness. I once asked a famous quarterback, in American football, on television, once asked him what the effect of the instant replay had been on the game of football and he said “We have now to play the game, in such a way, that the audience can watch the actual process that were performing”.
Speech on Video: The Medium Is the Message – 1977 (Part 2 Of 3), Youtube, Transcript: 06.53
Year: 1977
Chapters:
America, North America | Pattern Recognition
↪ Also at #5306
Sorry that you feel so helpless about the U.S. A. situation with regard to TV. The social and psychic cost to the community are fantastic.
Letter to Dr. Leslie Brinegar, Asst. Superintendent, Dept. of Education, State of California, September 14, 1977 [not in Letters]
Year: 1977
Chapter:
America, North America
If you are asking about the ordinary secular climate of the Church, or its prospects as a secular institution, I should think the opportunities for survival are a heck of a lot better than those of the United States or any other secular institution.
Interview with Edward Wakin (1977), republished as “Our Only Hope Is Apocalypse”, in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 59
Year: 1977
Chapters:
America, North America | Democracy
↪ Also at #1454
Our entire mode of thought is based on equilibrium: "Things will return to normal," we think. But equilibrium is a principle inherited from Newton. No balance is possible at the speed of light, in economics, physics, in the Church, or wherever…
“Keys to the Electronic Revolution: First Conversation with Pierre Babin” (1977), in The Medium and the Light, (1999), p 46
Year: 1977
Things will not restabilize. At the speed of light, in a culture that changes from day to day, when we can live a century in ten years, when every day of our lives we can pass through at least a hundred years of historical development, then we have to adapt our psychic and physical lives so that they change at the same rate.
“Keys to the Electronic Revolution: First Conversation with Pierre Babin” (1977), in The Medium and the Light, 1999 pp 45-46
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Anticipating Change
Well, their attention span is very weak, as you know. We've invented the one-liner in place of the joke because people can't wait around to hear you tell a joke. It takes too long. "As for critics," said Sam Goldwyn, "don't even ignore them." That's a one-liner. That's all we have time for. Attention span gets very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.
“Violence as a Quest for Identity” (1977), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 271
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Attention
Yes, everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light, it's called being mass man, by the way, one of the big marks of the loss of identity is nostalgia and so, revivals on all hands in every phase of life today, revivals of clothing, of dances, of music, of shows, of everything. We live by the revival, it tells us who we are or where.
Video TVO apppearance with Mike McManus, “Violence as a Quest for Identity” (1977), transcript, 04:39
Year: 1977
Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being “mass man.” It began quite a long time ago.
Mike McManus TVO interview, 1977, transcript 7:33
Year: 1977
Chapters:
Audience, Public, Mass | Dropout | Identity | LOM 2 - Obsolesce | Living Unity | McLuhanisms & Zingers
The artist is inspired by people who are lacking awareness of the things of which he is intensely aware.
The Place and Function of Art in Contemporary Life, UNESCO Speech, 1977, Transcript p 1
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Audience, Public, Mass
The philosopher is impatient to correct the stupidities and misconceptions of his public and the artist is eager to open the doors of perception for his public, which he feels has been completely deprived of vision.
“The Place and Function of Art in Contemporary Life,” UNESCO Speech, 1977, Transcript of his talk, p 1
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Authority of Knowledge
Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.
“The Rise and Fall of Nature,” Journal of Communication, December, 1977, p 80
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Authority of Knowledge
There are specific physical exercises which can overcome the visual effects of TV watching, especially the use of the trampoline in grade school years.
Letter to the Editor, The Miami Herald, February 15 (1977)
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Body
I have an essay coming out in a Harvard book on Canada called “Canada: The Borderline Case.” It's in a book called The Canadian Imagination. And the theme has to do with the strange effects of being on so many borderlines in Canada. We have so many cultural borderlines in every direction that it is very confusing to the idea of private identity or even group identity. But it is very enriching too, because people on frontiers have a very rich life of interplay with other people, other cultures.
Mike McManus TVO interview, 1977, transcript 26:10
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Canada
MCMANUS: Would you like to tell us whether the country [Canada] is going to stay together or not? And thereby be telling us what's happening to us now? MCLUHAN: Well, that is a... I don't know if I'd call that a prophecy or not. There is a sense in which the separatism occurred long ago. But there is a hardware sense in which it is still intact. The country is still intact in a hardware sense, a legal sense. It is the hardware, I think, that is under danger under electric conditions. The hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light.
“Mike McManus TVO interview with Marshall McLuhan” (1977), transcript 27:12
Year: 1977
Chapters:
Canada | Predictions
↪ Also at #5635
MCMANUS: What about the multi-cultured mosaic?
MCLUHAN: That is an amazing ploy to preserve the cultural identity of Quebec and other minorities. It’s to...
MCMANUS: Why do you call it a ploy, though?
McLUHAN: The Quebecois are terrified of being merged in the American culture. I think it's as simple as that. And I think they're right. They're absolutely vulnerable. We're all vulnerable to the Americans, and they're a very attractive and wonderful people, and I think we could easily become merged in their lives, as we tend to be anyway.
MCMANUS: Does that mean, in order to lessen their fears, we attempt to paralyze different immigrant groups coming in at the state of their arrival?
MCLUHAN: And keep their cultures intact and separate. That is the meaning of the multi-cultural mosaic. The mosaic is static. It isn't in a state of constant inter-animation, or interplay. No, it's static. And that's exactly the way the French want to remain; they want to remain just the way they are. And so it's not that easy. So this is an amazing, as I say, ploy developed to make this possible. I don't know if it will work, but I certainly don't wish them ill on this manoeuvre. It is a kind of media ecology, you see? It's a way of using our available resources in communication to keep people apart. And to keep them intact without merging. So it is, I think, it's a drastic move. I never heard of it occurring in any other country, did you? I never heard of a multi-cultural mosaic as an idea for immigration. It's an amazing strategy of survival. Survival, however, is a legitimate goal in life, especially in a fast-changing world.
“Mike McManus TVO interview” (1977), transcript 24:14
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Canada
It [the coming transformation of culture] is formed as a vast global resonant unity. It ignores all forms of specialization, all fragmentation, all logic. Faced with this invasion, Greco-Roman culture cannot resist and it is in the process of rapidly falling apart, abruptly and suddenly, so much so that we faced an unbelievable crisis. The Church is watching its cultural infrastructure crumble beneath its feet. When everything happens at the speed of light — at electric speed — the Greco-Roman world gives way. Doubtless the Church was always built for this civilization, but there is nothing in the new technology to sustain it. Of course, there will be a strong reaction when we catch our breath, but for now our young have been conquered by this electric world.
“Keys to the Electronic Revolution: First Conversation with Pierre Babin” (1977) in The Medium and the Light, 1999, p 50
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Catholic Church
In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message. It is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.
“Religion and Youth: Second Conversation with Pierre Babin” (1977), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 103
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Catholic Church
↪ Also at #894
The Catholic Church does not depend on human wisdom or human strategies for survival. All the best intentions in the world can't destroy the Catholic Church! It is indestructible, even as a human institution. It may once again undergo a terrible persecution and so on. But that's probably what it needs.
“Futurechurch: Edward Wakin interviews Marshall McLuhan”, in U.S. Catholic Magazine, Vol 42 N1 January, (1977), p 6
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Catholic Church
It is a very confusing kind of world in which, as I say, you have no time to get adjusted to anything or acquainted with anybody. You know, we live in a world where you meet many, many people per day for the once and only time in your life or their lives.
“The Education of Mike McManus”, TVO interview, 1977, transcript 18:16
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Change
Trudeau has the mask of an American Indian and it’s a potent mask. The American Indian does not have a private face. He has the face of his tribe, his clan. Now that’s good TV. It’s called charisma.
“Macleans Interview”, in Macleans magazine (1977), p 4
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Charisma
At the speed of light, policies and parties yield place to charismatic images.
Quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle, July 13, 1977, p 6
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Charisma
The main verb in all this is the speed of light, which also alters the role of politician from a party representative to a charismatic image. This image obsolesces parties and policies alike.
Letter to Pierre Elliot Trudeau, December 13, 1977, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 537
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Charisma
To be a good TV image, you have to look like a lot of other people. That’s called charisma.
“Interview on the Effects of Media”, CBC appearance with Peter Gzowski, 1977, transcript, 2:29
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Charisma
[Chesteron] was a cubist, you see? A paradox is a form of cubism in which you look at the same situation simultaneously from different directions.
“Mike McManus”, TVO interview (1977), transcript 21:18
Year: 1977
Chapters:
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith | Cubism
↪ Also at #1009
The alternative to violence is dialogue.
Monday Conference, TV appearance in Australia, June, 1977, interviewed by the audience; transcript: 8:39
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Dialogue
People on frontiers have a very rich interplay with other people, other cultures.
TVO Interview with Mike McManus (1977), transcript 27:34
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Dialogue
And, while your voice is there, you and the people you speak to are here, at the same time. Electric man has no bodily being, he is literally discarnate. But a discarnate world, like the one we now live in, is a tremendous menace to an incarnate Church, and its theologians haven't even deemed it worthwhile to examine the fact.
“Keys to the Electronic Revolution”, Conversation with Pierre Babin (1977), in The Medium And The Light (1999), p 50
Year: 1977
When you are on the air you are, in a way, everywhere at once. Electric man is a "super angel." When you are on the telephone you have no body.
“Keys to the Electronic Revolution” Pierre Babin interview (1977), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 50
Year: 1977
Invading privacy, in fact, just ignoring it, everybody has become porous. They let the light and the message go right through us, by the way, at this moment, we are on the air, and on the air. We do not have any physical body. When you're on the telephone, or on the radio, or on TV, you don't have a physical body; you're just an image on the air. When you don't have a physical body; you're a discarnate being, you have a very different relation to the world around you, and this, I think, has been one of the big effects of the electric age. It has deprived people, really, of their private identity.
Marshall McLuhan in Conversation with Mike McManus”, TVO, September 19, 1977, 06:57
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Discarnate
By this line of thought, [audio-visual] education continues media violence against the numbed nervous system, adds to the experience of losing one’s body in the electronic media environment, and promotes loss of identity.
“What television is doing to us--and why: The eye as ear TV on the brain Marshall McLuhan on 'violent media' “, The Washington Post, May 15, (1977). P H1 …This is likely not the source. Need to look at article a 2nd time. Lawrence Has copy.
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Discarnate
Politically, discarnate man may have an image, but not a physical body.
Letter to Pierre Elliot Trudeau, February 24, 1977, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1988), p 528
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Discarnate
Whereas hardware communication is a kind of transportation which centralizes organizational on every part of a structure. That is why the executive drops out of the old organization-chart patterns at electric speed. At electric speed, which is the speed of light, we are disembodied beings. On the phone, or "on the air", we are instantly present, but minus our bodies.
Letter to Pierre Elliot Trudeau, February 24, 1977, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 528
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Discarnate
MCMANUS: What now briefly is this thing called media ecology?
MCLUHAN: It means arranging various media to help each other so they won’t cancel each other out, to buttress one medium with another. You might say, for example, that radio is a bigger help to literacy than television, but television might be a very wonderful aid to teaching languages. So, you can do some things on some media that you cannot do on others. Therefore, if you watch the whole field, you can prevent this waste that comes by one cancelling out the other.
MCMANUS: But do you think that perhaps at the end of your studies of media ecology, you're going to advise a cut-down on watching television? $500 for anyone who will give it up for a day?
MCLUHAN: Europeans have cut back on that almost down to nothing long ago because they realized that it threatened literate values very much. An hour a week is about what the French child gets for television.
Mike McManus TVO interview, 1977, transcript 17:57. Also in Understanding Me (2003), p 275
Year: 1977
Chapters:
Ecology | Media Study
↪ Also at #4677
In the 17th and 18th centuries as the bourgeoisie got going they tended to pull their kids out of the environment and put them in school rooms where they could be given highly specialized training of what is now called literacy. But that sort of training had been alien to the studies of, say, the Middle Ages. Young people [then] became workers from the age of seven — they were fully qualified workmen, up to a point, by the age of seven. Today in the electronic environment a person of three years of age can be senile, grey, with excess information.
City as Classroom Interview with Carl Scharfe, 1977
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Education
Finnegans Wake is quite aware that anybody who learns to speak a proper tongue or dialect has acquired vast information and vast skill. A child who at the age of one speaks English or his native tongue has learned more than he will ever learn again in all his life put together. That is because the language itself is a vast store of information and when a child has learned to speak English or Polish he has learned more than he will ever learn again in all his life put together. Well that is because language has this peculiar character: it is a storehouse, it’s like a databank. Language is a vast databank stored with the impressions and knowledge of countless millions of people. Anybody who can speak any language has access to this huge databank of a language. Now electronically we are more and more aware of this and we’re more and more trying to simulate these databanks. We’re trying now mechanically as it were to store in databanks things which are already inherent in any language.
City as Classroom Interview with Carl Scharfe, 1977
Year: 1977
↪ Also at #3194
TV has taken over. It has wiped out private ego and put people into a collective or tribal state. Private identity has almost disappeared from North America. That's why people go to psychiatrists. They want to know: "What's happening to me? Tell me what to do." The tribal man listens to voices that tell him exactly what to do so he doesn't have to make up his mind.
“Speaking out. Marshall McLuhan on the evils of TV”, in US, July 12, 1977, p 13
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Education
An artist has a role rather than a job because he must use all his faculties at once. In the older fragmented and mechanized world of specialisms we tended to use only a part of our faculties at any one time. This was called ‘work’. When, like the artist, we use all our faculties at once, we are recognized to be playing and are at leisure. A man must work very hard at his hobby, but just because he uses all his faculties while playing, he is thought to be at leisure. The electronic information environment tends to create this new configuration of leisure via total involvement.
“Environment as Programmed Happening” (1977), p 8
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Education
[“Media ecology”] means arranging various media to help each other so they won’t cancel each other out, to buttress one medium with another. You might say, for example, that radio is a bigger help to literacy than television, but television might be a very wonderful aid to teaching languages.
“Violence as a Quest for Identity”, in The Mike McManus Show, TV Ontario (1977), Transcript, p 4
Year: 1977
Chapters:
Education | Media Education
↪ Also at #4528
The best way to study the nature of any medium is to study its effects on other media because you can see them spelled out there. So when you study the effect of TV on sports, then you begin to understand the nature of TV. And when you see its effects on politics, in advertising and in movies, then you begin to understand it.
Conversation with MM, 1977, p 62
Year: 1977
Chapters:
Effect | Media Study
↪ Also at #4693
The detective story is an electronic form – because it uses the total environment as plot.
“What TV Is Doing To Us” Washington Post, May 15, 1977, p H5
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Electric, Electronic
MCMANUS: So there are some parallels? MCLUHAN: Well, sure, the habit of discontinuous and multileveled perception, but it goes partly also with in my interest in Joyce, Pound, Eliot, because they are also multi-faceted people and very right-hemisphere people.
“Violence as a quest for identity” (Mike McManus TVO Interview), 1977, in Understanding Me, 2003, p 273
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Eliot, T.S.
In Gestalt, reality presents itself to the mind as a figure detaching itself from a ground. We notice the figure first and most often it dominates our whole field of consciousness.
Religion and Youth (Conversation with Pierre Babin, 1977) in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 100
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Figure/Ground
Human perception encourages us to pay attention to the figure (a painting) and to ignore the ground (its frame, the wall, etc.).
“Religion and Youth” (Pierre Babin interview), 1977, in The Medium and the Light, 1999, p 94
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Figure/Ground
…the Greeks excluded the notion of zero…
“The Alphabet, Mother of Invention” with Robert K. Logan, in Et Cetera, 1977, p 380
Year: 1977
Chapter:
From Tribal to Literate
The closer you get together, the more you like each other? There’s no evidence of that in any situation that we’ve ever heard of. When people get close together, they get more and more savage, impatient with each together….The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations"...
Interview with Mike McManus, TVO, 1977
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Global Village
The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.
TV interview, The Education of Mike McManus, TV Ontario, Dec. 28, 1977
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Global Village
Lineal, connected, infinite, static Euclidean space gives way to a dynamic, resonating, non-lineal, non-Euclidean, finite, closed universe which folds back on itself – “On a clear day you can see the back of your head.”
“Alphabet, Mother of Invention” with Robert K. Logan, in Et Cetera (1977), p 381
Year: 1977
The sociological approach to the human environment began with Sputnik in 1957. So far, society has meant hardware, and supplies, and quantification of things and people. Now the time is ripe to scan the software environment, the planetary surround of electric information and its effects on the diverse populations of the globe.
“When the West Goes East and the East Goes West,” unpublished one page typescript dated January 6, 1977.
Year: 1977
Chapters:
Hardware / Software | Planet, Nature
↪ Also at #5405
MIKE McMANUS: You say, too, that between today's child who has been raised electronically — and who must still live in a literate world, because we are still in a literate world — that there's a 2400-year gap between that boy or girl and his parents...
McLUHAN: And his parents, who grew up in a literate society. Well, the alphabet, the phonetic alphabet, the beginnings of western literacy, came in about 500 B.C. And since then, between then and now is approximately 2400 or 2500 years. And we are the first post-literate generation, as it were. We have by-passed the literate world of hardware and the lineal left hemisphere technology. We have by-passed it by moving once more, again, into the altogether world, the holistic world, of the right hemisphere people, who are the third-world people. So what is happening to our own children is we're watching them become third-world.
“Mike McManus TVO interview”, 1977, transcript 9:28
Year: 1977
Chapters:
Hardware / Software | Today’s Transition
↪ Also at #6875
McMANUS: Now, these children that are more groupy and less private, are they also more passionate or more violent?
McLUHAN: I think that the sheer dislocation of their lives has put them through a very violent course, indeed. They have been ripped off.
McMANUS: But they're kind of rudderless.
McLUHAN: They don't have goals. Because, at the speed of light, what is a goal? You're already there. You name it, and you're there.
“Mike McManus TVO interview”, 1977, transcript 11:03
Year: 1977
Chapters:
Hardware / Software | Today’s Transition
↪ Also at #6876
What the brain surgeons discovered about the two hemispheres of the brain tells us that the First World is left hemisphere, and the Third World is right hemisphere. For decades I have been trying to expound the difference in terms of the eye and the ear orientation of cultures. The Greeks and the Romans gave special salience to the eye via the phonetic alphabet and the invention of Euclidean space. With the alphabet, the lineal and connected character of space became apparent to literate man alone. The “barbarians” went on living in acoustic space, in a world dominated by oral culture. Logic belongs to the left hemisphere alone, but the simultaneous world of the right hemisphere is given new dominance be the electric information environment. This fact is not known to the hemisphere analysts.
Letter to Mike Gravel, January 17, 1977, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 526
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Hemispheres of the Brain
Now in the electric age, at the speed of light, we need to process these things through the right hemisphere, that is, holistically, using formal cause. And in formal cause the effects appear before the causes. It is crucial that we use this approach. We need to know in advance what the effects on the users will be before we build the particular medium.
Religion and Youth: Second Conversation with Pierre Babin, 1977, in The Medium and the Light, p 101
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Hemispheres of the Brain
Remember, at the speed of light you can go through centuries in a few minutes.
“What TV Is Doing to Use -- and Why”, Washington Post, 1977, p [locate the rest]
Year: 1977
Chapter:
History
e reassure you that the University of Dallas is a wonderful spot, a university which has retained human scale, honour-course traditions and rich dialogue.
“To Malcolm Muggeridge (1977)”, in Letters, p 529
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Human Scale
Every one of us is now living in a time of overload. Everywhere we turn is information, packaged, and/or just broadcast, pouring all over you, all the time. And so, in this environment, you desperately need pattern recognition, which is hunting. Give me the clue. Clue me in, quick.
The Inside Exchange, 1977, p 3 of photo copy
Year: 1977
Chapters:
Hunters of Information | Information Overload
↪ Also at #2971
Attention span gets very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.
“Violence as a Quest for Identity” (1977), in Understanding Me (2003), p 271
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Identity
The individual self... is a by-product of the alphabet and the visual world that flows from it.
Conversation with Pierre Babin (1977), reprinted inThe Medium and the Light (1999), p 95
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Individual
Innis is the real freak. How did that hick Baptist ever come up with this amazing method of studying the effects of technology?
Macleans interview, 1977, p 9
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Innis, Harold Adams
The interplay between figure and ground is where the action is. The interplay is an interval or a gap like the space between the wheel and the axle.
The city as Classroom (1977)
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Interval
I consider my greatest achievement is the discovery that all human artifacts -- all the extensions of man - are patterned structurally in the mode of the word. Whether it is a medium like radio, a bulldozer, or a safety-pin, whether it is the word, or a law of science, all these utterings and outerings of man have a four-part structure which is that of metaphor itself. I will illustrate this discovery from the character of money, which:
Enhances the speed of exchange,
Obsolesces barter,
Retrieves potlatch (conspicuous waste), and
When pushed to the limit, flips or reverses its character into credit
Letter to Avant-Garde magazine, December 22, 1977, responding to their question, “What is your greatest achievement?”, p 8
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Laws of Media
VERBUM (utterance): (A) Intensifies and crystallizes percept - as word (thing); (B) Obsolesces the merely sensory via perceptual interplay; (C) Retrieval: transference of power from things to word-as-vortex; (D) Reverses into the conceptual (replay of meaning-minus-the experience).
“Laws of the Media,” Et Cetera, Volume 34, No.2, June, 1977, p 177
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Laws of Media
Mirror
MIRROR (mirari— to wonder): (A) Enhances ego by repetition and self-advertisement; echo-matching of a figure-minus-its-ground; instrument for self-portraiture (Rembrandt, etc.); adjunct of phonetic literacy via visual intensity; (print has the same effect for the user— i.e., self-advertisement); (B) Obsolesces the corporate mask and corporate appearance (costume): dress replaces costume; (C) Retrieves the mode of Narcissus (magic, metamorphic tunnel vision); mirror as sitter, painter as audience and as admirer; (D) Reverses into “making process as outlook becomes insight.
“Laws of the Media,” Et Cetera, Volume 34, Jan. 1, 1977, p 178
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Laws of Media
Just now, our youngsters have been completely taken over by the electric world, which is acoustic, intuitive, holistic, that is, global and total — a new world that has obsolesced our old scientific world with its quantities, its size, our over-industrialized First World.
“Religion and Youth” (Interview, Pierre Babin), 1977, in The Medium and the Light, (1999), p 95
Year: 1977
Chapter:
LOM 2 - Obsolesce
The whole success of "Star Wars" is based on the nostalgia. "Flash Gordon," and "Alice In Wonderland," and "Wizard of Oz" - all those great pictures were brought back into "Star Wars."
Interview in Videography, 1977, p 63
Year: 1977
Chapter:
LOM 3 – Retrieve
One sure way to perceive the structure of any situation easily is to reverse its figure/ground relationship.
City as Classroom, 1977, p 20
Year: 1977
Paradoxically, the alphabet enabled the Greeks to reduce the illusive polyphonies of their oral culture by selecting and logically (visually) connecting what had been simultaneous and musical. If the Greek means of abstracting and conceptualizing was by logical connection, the abstract art and science of the twentieth century proceeds
by the contrary means of pulling out the "logical" (visual) connections in space and time. This returns the art and philosophy of today to musical form.
“Alphabet, Mother of Invention” with Robert K. Logan, Et Cetera, Volume 33, No 4, January 11, 1977, p 377
Year: 1977
,.. you get a certain immunity from booze by literacy. The literate man can carry his liquor; the tribal man cannot. That's why in the Muslim world, or in the Native world, booze is impossible; it's the demon rum.
Mike McManus TVO interview, 1977, transcript 12:52
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Literacy
These media are violent in the sense they invade us, like pornography. The defense is not to pass a law or to say this shouldn’t happen… The defense is to understand the thing and to, well to pull the plug out if necessary.
“What Television Is Doing to Us and Why,” in Washington Post, May 15, 1977, p H1
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Mastering Technology
↪ Also at #3764
My values are strongly centered in literacy, which I teach day and night.
“Violence as a Quest for Identity,” 1977, in Understanding Me (2003), p 272
Year: 1977
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
MIKE McMANUS: But you wouldn't like to see the literate world disintegrate?
MARSHALL McLUHAN: By no means. My values are strongly centered in literacy, which I teach day and night, as it were.
McMANUS: And do you think it will survive?
McLUHAN: I imagine so. I think so.
Mike McManus TVO interview, 1977, transcript 19:16
Year: 1977
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
Me? Personally? I’m neither pessimist nor optimist… I’m an apocalyptic!
“Futurechurch: Edward Wakin interviews Marshall McLuhan”, in U.S. Catholic Magazine, Vol 42 N1 January, (1977), p 6 republished as “Our Only Hope Is Apocalypse,” in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 59
Year: 1977
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
I never came into the church as a person who was being taught. I came in on my knees. That is the only way in. When people start praying they need truths; that’s all. You don’t come into the Church by ideas and concepts, and you cannot leave by mere disagreement. It has to be a loss of faith, a loss of participation. You can tell when people leave the Church: they have quit praying.
“Futurechurch: Edward Wakin interviews Marshall McLuhan”, in U.S. Catholic Magazine, Vol 42 N1 January, (1977), p 6 republished as “Our Only Hope Is Apocalypse,” in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 64
Year: 1977
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
As a teacher of literacy, my primary concern has always been the understanding of literacy and its environmental polluters.
Letter to the Editor, in The Miami Herald, February. 15, (1977)
Year: 1977
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
Personally, I am not only dedicated to the teaching of literacy, but also to the study of how to overcome the effects of TV in undermining literacy. There are specific physical exercises which can overcome the visual effects of TV watching, especially the use of the trampoline in grade school years. The fact that 90% of all learning disabilities relate only to the male population, points to one of the special TV effects in relation to the motor muscles of the eyes.
Letter to the Editor, The Miami Herald, February 15, (1977)
Year: 1977
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
McMANUS: But I'm thinking more about the fact that, born in Winnipeg and mastered in English, and English as largely studied in Cambridge for graduate studies, how English was largely your world, and literature — it's been under attack by these new electronic media, especially television. [Has] this been hard on you?
McLUHAN: I don't think so. Because there's always the challenge of meeting the opposition head on.
“The Education of Mike McManus,” TVO interview, (1977), transcript: 18:49
Year: 1977
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
McMANUS: So, in 15 seconds, I've got one question for you: how much television do you watch?
McLUHAN: Whenever I get a chance, which is not too often. I missed Rigoletto last night, I was very disappointed.
McMANUS: But you don't watch it that often?
McLUHAN: No, I don't have that many opportunities.
“The Education of Mike McManus,” TVO interview, (1977), transcript: 27:45
Year: 1977
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
MCMANUS: You describe your conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1938 as a long pilgrimage and a solitary one done entirely by reading.
MCLUHAN: That's, I think, true, except, again, I had luck. I met people, too. But it was mainly a literary activity.
“The Education of Mike McManus,” TVO interview, 1977, transcript 20:23
Year: 1977
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
So, at the speed of light, which is now the normal speed of most
information, on TV, radio, telephone and so on—at that speed the need to forget
has become a form of nostalgia.
Interview with Jerry Brown in The CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter 1977-1978,
Year: 1977
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
↪ Also at #4230
We live by the revival, it tells us who we are or where.
Video TVO appearance with Mike McManus, “Violence as a Quest for Identity” (1977), transcript, 04:39
Year: 1977
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
The need to forget has become a form of nostalgia.
Interview by Casey Baldwin in Maclean's magazine, Vol. 90 no. 5, March 7, 1977, p 8
Year: 1977
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
“TV uses the eye as an ear, not as an eye.”
In a talk to the Ontario Education College, 1977)
Year: 1977
↪ Also at #6737
Everybody has become porous. The light and the message go right through us.
TVO interview with Mike McManus, 1977, in “McLuhan Speaks” transcript, p 3
Year: 1977
Chapters:
McLuhanisms & Zingers | Privacy
↪ Also at #5756
…every day of our lives we can pass through at least a hundred years of historical development…
“First conversation with Pierre Babin” (1977), in The Medium and the Light, p 46
Year: 1977
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
Everybody at the speed of light tends to become a nobody.
“Interview by Casey Baldwin”, in Maclean's magazine, Vol. 90 no. 5, March 7, 1977, p 5
Year: 1977
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
Every business has a huge espionage sector. This is called public relations and audience research, and this...has become the main business of mankind, just watching the other guy.
“Violence as a Quest for Identity” (1977), Interview on The Mike McManus Show (TVO), in Understanding Me (2003), pp 267-268
Year: 1977
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
Had Nixon had a beard, he would still be in the White House.
“Jerry Brown Meets Marshall McLuhan” in The Coevolution Quarterly, Winter 1977/78, p 87
Year: 1977
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
All of the existing media studies have omitted to examine the impact of media forms, as such. If Gutenberg made everybody a reader, Xerox makes everybody a publisher, and the consequences in both cases are immense and revolutionary, regardless of what is printed or copied.
“When the West Goes East and the East Goes West,” unpublished one page typescript dated January 6, 1977
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Media as Form
TV is as radioactive as radium.
Letter to Clair Booth Luce, August 29, 1977, in Letters (1987), p 534
Year: 1977
Chapters:
Media Effects | Television
↪ Also at #6745
Apparently a lot of people are worried about it [pay TV] interfering with other services, that it might take away the audiences from movie houses or something like that. I think that would not happen. For example, the freedom you have to take home LP discs and play them in no way impaired attendance at concerts. On the contrary, it has enormously increased interest in music.
“Conversation with Marshall McLuhan” (1977), p 60
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Media Effects
Media study, and those that pursue it, should not be regarded as enemies of the book. Au contraire: media studies has a number of insights to offer those who wish to revitalize the library and increase its effectiveness. Discovering the effects of new technologies such as the computer, reprography, microforms and audio-visual equipment are essential to understanding the role of the library today.
“Understanding Media Studies for Librarians” with Robert K. Logan, 1977 typescript, p 3
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Media Literacy
In today’s rapidly changing environment, people have two major concerns: to discover the new problems this environment poses, and to develop ways of coping with these problems.
Teacher’s Guide to City as Classroom, 1977, p 1
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Media Literacy
Up until now, media studies have been concerned with programming and content, rather than with the effects of the media themselves on the social and psychic make-up of their users. The recent awareness of the twin hemispheres of man’s brain has also drawn attention to the fact that the dominance of one or the other of these hemispheres depends upon the man-made environments to which they respond. Julian Jaynes attributes the rise of private consciousness and human individuality to the coming of the literate environment which broke down the tribal or bicameral unity of the two hemispheres of the brain. Today the split between the hemispheres is being mended by the new simultaneous environment of electric information. Nuclear man may be on the verge of abandoning his civilized institutions and their function in providing guidelines, goals and objectives. Now is the time to examine sociologically the peculiar and unique impact of the numerous extensions of our own bodies and nervous system.
The sociological approach to the human environment began with Sputnik in 1957. So far, society has meant hardware, and supplies, and quanitification of things and people. Now the time is ripe to scan the software environment, the planetary surround of electric information and its effects on the diverse populations of the globe.
“When the West Goes East and the East Goes West,” unpublished one page typescript dated January 6, 1977.
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Media Study
As for restricting the use of TV. it surely should be part of a media ecology program. If people became aware that TV watching diseased the young, physically, and independently of programming, there would be no problem about restricting its use. TV is as radioactive as radium.
Letter to Clare Boothe Luce, August 29, 1977, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 534
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Media Study
Now if you are going to sell all good news, you have to have an awful lot of bad news to make it go over. Hence, newspapers.
“What TV Is Doing To Us – And Why,” Washington Post, 1977, p H5 [add date]
Year: 1977
Chapter:
News
Under the kind of news coverage we have, everybody ... expects to be transformed into show biz.
What TV Is Doing To Us, 1977, p H5
Year: 1977
Chapter:
News
By the way, I want to mention a book to you, The Spear of Destiny by Trevor Ravenscroft, which concerns Wagner and the occult, and Hitler’s very considerable involvement in the higher mysteries of Satanism. It throws a good deal of light on the history of philosophy, especially since the Rosicrucians — including Hegel and Desjardines.
Letter to Professor Donald Theall, March 17, 1977, p 1
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Occult
Since Einstein, science has moved steadily away from the left hemisphere into the orbit of the right hemisphere, toward the ranks of parapsychology and the occult. The gap between the two cultures has become a resonating interval, not unlike the "missing link" which also stimulated a great deal of speculation.
Letter to Kendrick Frazier, March 11, 1977, p 1
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Occult
The English representing the highly literate society, and the Irish representing a more oral, and a much more communal, tribal group. And where the tribal feelings are strong, radio sends them up the wall.
Mike McManus TVO interview, 1977, transcript 4:54
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Oral
McManus: And still looking for pattern recognition?
McLuhan: It's one of the big excitements of life. It's a sort of detective activity, you know. I do a lot of sleuthing.
“Violence as a Quest for Identity” (TVO appearance, Mike McManus Show, 1977), in Understanding Me (2003), p 264
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Pattern Recognition
In art, percept precedes concept, while in science, method dominates both.
“Alphabet, Mother of Invention”with Robert K. Logan, Et Cetera. 1977 , p 378
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Percept
The Euclidean space of analytic geometry is a concept of the left hemisphere of the brain, while the multi-dimensional spaces of the holistic sensorium are percepts of the right hemisphere of the brain.
“Alphabet, Mother of Invention” with Robert K. Logan, in Et Cetera, 1977, p 380
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Percept
The teacher asked, “somebody define for me ‘nothing.’” And a child put his hand up at once and said, “teacher, when you peel a balloon, what you have left is nothing.”
Mike McManus TVO interview, 1977, transcript 14:00
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Playfulness
A language is the encoded form of the collective perceptions and wisdom of many people. And, poetry and song are the major means by which a language purifies and invigorates itself.
"Liturgy and Media: Third conversation with Piere Babin" from Autre homme, autre chrétien å I'åge électronique,Lyon: Editions du Chalet,(1977), reprinted in The Medium and The Light (1999) P 145
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Poetry
The Greek, in this way, developed the notion of objectivity and detachment, the separation of the knower from the object of his awareness. This is the beginning of the scientific method and the source of the dichotomy the Greeks created between subjective thinking as found in art and poetry, and objective thinking as exemplified by philosophy and science. In art, percept precedes concept, while in science, method dominates both.
“The Alphabet, Mother of Invention” with Robert K. Logan, in Et Cetera, (1977), p 378
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Poetry
[Of the Nixon-Frost TV discussions]
Well I thought, this is the first time in human history that a major actor in history played himself.
Monday Conference, Australian TV, 1977, transcript p 13
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Politics and Government
The bureaucratic organization of print cliche with uniform products and prices gives rise to capitalism as well as to the corporate activities of the scientist. This became more and more pronounced during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Adam Smith and Ben Franklin are sufficient exemplars of the glorification of fragmentation applied to industry and morals alike.
Print provoked the development of nationalism, because, for the first time, everyone could see their mother tongue and not just hear it. In fact, people's consciousness of their national identity took root in a visual ground. The world of print is visual.
“Keys to the Electronic Revolution,” Interview, Pierre Babin, 1977, in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 47
Year: 1977
Chapters:
Print | Specialism
↪ Also at #6487
The literate man is the natural sucker for propaganda. You cannot propagandize a Native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas. Therefore, propaganda is our Achilles heel. It's our weak point. We will buy anything if it's got a good, hard sell tied to it. And so propaganda is the great big soft spot in the makeup of the literate man.
“The Education of Mike McManus,” TVO interview, 1977, transcript 13:10
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Propaganda
…reading is actually an activity of rapid guessing because any word has so many meanings, including the word “reading,” many many meanings, that to select one, in a context of other words, requires very rapid guessing. That's why a good reader tends to be a very quick decision-maker.
Monday Conference (1977), a TV appearance in Australia where McLuhan answered questions from the audience for one hour; transcript: 4:44
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Reading
My "foul language" consisted in explaining to such big names as Bob McNamara, George Ball, Dean Rusk, and many from the U.K., that they had not a single clue concerning a world in which information moved at the speed of light. They were uniformly nineteenth-century minds pretending to relate to the twentieth century.
Letter to Robert H. Eringer, May 30, 1977, In Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 531
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Rear View Mirror
Orwell's 1984 is a replay of 1934 and the 1920's. All those things that happened then. He made them surface. "Newspeak," for heaven's sake, was Time magazine.
Macleans interview With Professor Marshall McLuhan, 1977
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Rear View Mirror
What kind of people were we? You know this crazy passion of the adopted child now to find out who his parents were? That's the same mentality -- a demand to have it all here now to look at, again. That questing backwards in time is an instant technique, straight out of TV.
“Media in the 70s: A Dialog with Marshall McLuhan”, in Videography, October (1977), pp 64-65
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Rear View Mirror
when people have been stripped of their private identities they develop huge nostalgia, and nostalgia for the jeans and levis of the young today are nostalgia for grand-dad's overall.
Monday Conference, 1977, p 8 of their transcript
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Rear View Mirror
These essential aspects of liturgical change were neither predicted nor programmed, and they remain unnoticed by the users of church resonance. I make no value judgments in this regard. I merely suggest that these results come from a typical visual Western mentality as it approaches technological innovation
"Liturgy and Media: Third conversation with Piere Babin" from Autre homme, autre chrétien å I'åge électronique,Lyon: Editions du Chalet,(1977), reprinted in The Medium and The Light (1999) P 144
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Religion
I would say it is a very wide open question whether the Greek or Roman church has any future at all as a Greek or Roman institution. It would be a good time to be Russian orthodox: they split off from Rome because it was too literate. The Eastern church is an "ear" church; Rome was always very far on the visual road to visual power.
“Future church” (1977), p 8
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Religion
[Asking a famous quarterback the effect of the instant replay] …and he said, We now have to play the game in such a way that the audience can watch the actual process that we’re performing…. They’re not any longer interested just in the effect of the play, they want to see the nature of the play…
Speech at Monday Conference (ABC-TV Australia), August, 1977, transcript, p 10
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Replay
I think now we're playing it backwards. We're going back into the bicameral mind, which is tribal, collective, without any individual consciousness.
“Violence as a Quest for Identity” (Mike McManus Interview, TVO), 1977, in Understanding Me (2003), p 264
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Retribalizing
Well, when things change at very high speeds, a need for continuity develops. You see, you're in such a complete discontinuity at high speed. Everything you're looking at now is gone in a second and our demands are to hang on to older things. So the antique stores and the love of taking the varnish off of old tables, revealing their original state, and that sort of thing is a passion today. In order toy' think, you have to forget most of what you are experiencing in order to relate it to earlier things that you knew, otherwise you can't infer anything from what you are seeing. So, at the speed of light, which is now the normal speed of most information, on TV, radio, telephone and so on—at that speed the need to forget has become a form of nostalgia.
Interview with Jerry Brown in The CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter 1977-1978, p 178
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Speedups
And so you can learn an enormous amount about the business community by studying the rules and procedures in cricket or baseball, or golf, as far as that goes. All these games are huge ways of discovering, dramatizing, what the society you´re in is all about.
Monday Conference; 1977 TV appearance in Australia, where MM answered questions from the audience for one hour; transcript: 12:11
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Sports and Games
It has become one of the main occupations of mankind: just watching other people and keeping a record of their goings-on. This is the way most businesses are run. Every business has a huge espionage sector. And this is called public relations, and it's called audience research. And this is around the clock. And this has become the main business of mankind: just watching the other guy.
Mike McManus TVO interview, 1977, transcript 6:12
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Surveillance
↪ Also at #6602
We all become show biz under the kind of news coverage we have, everybody expects coverage, everybody expects to be transformed into show biz to some degree.
“What TV Is Doing to Us – And Why,” Washington Post, May 15, 1977, p H5
Year: 1977
↪ Also at #7081
The best medium for teaching language is the telephone. People don’t know that. Because on the telephone you have to give your total attention. Otherwise, you get nothing.
“A Conversation with Marshall McLuhan” (1977), p 60
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Telephone
The TV child ends to hold his book about 4.6” in front of his eyes. At that distance, and Hurst did these measurements over the years, at this distance you use only one eye, so the TV child is also monocular…
Talk to Ontario Teacher Education Collage, 1977, p 8
Year: 1977
Chapters:
Television | Youth
↪ Also at #7528
I don't think Hitler would have lasted long on TV. Like Senator Joe McCarthy, he would have looked foolish. He was a very hot character. Like Nixon made a very bad image on television, he was far too hot a character. Much better on radio or on the movies. Not bad on the movies, which will take quite hot characters. But Nixon was hopeless on TV.
Mike McManus TVO interview, 1977, transcript 5:32
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Television
The TV thing itself is very, very polluting. It goes right into the nervous system. The problem is how literate is your society, your family circle, your immediate circle. Your child is coming out in an intensely literate world, so he can take a fair amount of TV without too much harm. But to the ordinary kid without a lot of literacy, TV will just turn off any possibility of left hemisphere.
Interview, Maclean's, March 7, 1977
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Television
[With television] you are drawn into that tube, as an inner trip. You're totally involved. You have no objectivity, no distance. And it is acoustic. It resonates. But this is a hidden ground, because superficially people think they're looking at a visual program. And they're not. They're not looking at all—they're absorbed, involved in a resonating experience. And it is not objective, it is entirely subjective.
Interview with California Gov. Jerry Brown, The CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter 1977-8
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Television
…the TV screen just pours that energy into you, which paralyzes the eye; you are not looking at it, it is looking at you.
Talk to the Ontario Education College, 1977, p 6 of typescript
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Television
One of the things that happens at the speed of light is that people lose their goals in life. So what takes the place of goals and objectives? Well, role-playing is coming in very fast.
Conversation with California Governor Gerry Brown, 1977
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Television
[The Third World is….] …the kind of world we need to understand in order to understand ourselves.
Lecture, “The Place and Function of Art in Contemporary Life” (1977); transcript, p 3
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Today’s Transition
Yes, all forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live out on the frontier, you have no identity. You are a nobody. Therefore, you get very tough. You have to prove that you are somebody. So you become very violent.
“Violence as a Quest for identity,” appearance on the Mike McManus Show (TVO), 1977, “McLuhan Speaks” transcript, p 2
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Violence
In a certain way, I also think that this could be the time of the Antichrist. When electricity allows for the simultaneity of all information for every human being, it is Lucifer’s moment. He is the greatest electrical engineer.
“Tomorrow’s Church: Fourth Conversation with Pierre Babin (1977), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 209
Year: 1977
Chapters:
Wake Them Up! | Warnings
↪ Also at #7440
… today's teens hate bigness. That is a peculiarity of electric speed where you have everything happening at once, in the same place. Instead of expansion or explosion, you have a sudden contracion or implosion. "Small is beautiful" is their motto. The fact that the ntire world is at their fingertips shapes their thinking. So they start to ask questions. "Why do we have giant expressways?" "Why do we need to keep going faster on them and in bigger and bigger vehicles?" “Why do we need railway tracks?" "Why all of this?"
“Religion and Youth”: Second Conversation with Pierre Babin (1977), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 95
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Youth
The kids are looking for some sort of stability. And the old comics have that kind of solid moral values - everything was right or wrong. And there are no moral values at the speed of light. Moral values just dissolve. That´s why you have separatism all around the world. Legal structures will not hold up at the speed of light. Electric information takes the place of legal bonds.
“Interview with Jerry Brown” in The CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter 1977-1978, p 178
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Youth
↪ Also at #7522
At the speed of light, the inner trip is all that's left. Young people prefer Zen Buddhism to our Western form of spirituality. They want to be immersed in things and lose the individual self, which is a by-product of the alphabet and the visual world that flows from it.
“Religion and Youth: Second Conversation with Pierre Babin” (1977), in The Medium and the Light, 1999, p 94
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Youth
Mr. Eliot is here pointing to the revolution in language and consciousness that occurs when we move from the plane of the simultaneous interplay of multiple factors and experiences.
“Liturgy and the Microphone”, (1974), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 108
Year: 1974
Chapter:
Eliot, T.S.
Conformists do not see the future until it is the past.
Reported heard in 1976-1977 by Thomas Cooper
Year: 1976
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers