…the TV camera is very much more selective and abstract than the motion picture camera. In fact, what makes the pictorial as opposed to the iconic is the inclusion of a vast amount of detail. The filling-in of space with great quantities of detail is what the Renaissance painters learned to do in the third dimension. They discovered that you could take space and fill it with objects. The iconic man doesn’t fill space with objects. He makes space. The icon form tends not to be three-dimensional space so much as a made, shaped, molded, modulated resonating space.
“The Future of Man in the Electric Age” (Frank Kermode interview, 1965), in Understanding Me (2003), p 68
Year: 1965
Chapter:
Iconic
Compiled by William Kuhns
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan