By coordinating and accelerating human meetings and goings-on, clocks increase the sheer quantity of human exchange.

Enhancement and obsolescence are obviously complementary actions.

Typing reduces expression from art to craft, from personal to impersonal.

Print provided a vast new memory for past writings that made a personal memory inadequate.

Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certain contracts the world to village size, and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumor, and personal malice.

The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber.

Whenever any new medium or human extension occurs, it creates a new myth for itself, usually associated with a major figure: Aretino, the Scourge of Princes and the Puppet of Printing; Napoleon and the trauma of industrial change; Chaplin, the public conscience of the movie; Hitler, the tribal totem of radio; the Florence Nightengale, the first singer of human use by telegraph wire.

When a technology is new it yields utopias. Such is Plato's Republic in the 5th century B.C., when phonetic writing was being established. Similarly, More's Utopia is written in the 16th century when the printed book had just become established.

[Money] gives great spatial extension and control to political organizations, just as writing does, or the calendar. It is action at a distance, both in space and in time.

[T]he dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the twentieth century the number of past times that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy.

An archetype is a retrieved awareness of consciousness ... a quoted extension, medium, technology or environment.

New styles are really responses to new environments, and fashion is always looking into a rear-view mirror to find something nostalgic to revive.
“Understanding Canada and Sundry other matters: Marshall McLuhan”, interview in Mademoiselle Magazine, January (1967), p 115