writing

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space : boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of the bog.

The goose quill put an end to talk. Il abolished mystery ; it gave architecture and towns ; it brought roads and armies, bureaucracy. Il was the basic metaphor with which the cycle of civilization began, the step from the dart into the light of the mind. The hand that filled the parchment page built a city whence did the wond’rous mystic art arise, of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes ? That we by tracing magic line are taught, How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT ?

Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, The medium is the massage, A penguin book, 1967, p. 48.

extension

All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or psysical. The wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye… clothing, an extension of the skin… electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system. Media, by altering the environnement, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extensin of any one sense alters the way we think and act - the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change.

Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, The medium is the massage, A penguin book, 1967, pp. 26-41.

visual

Art, or the graphic translation of the culture, is shaped by the way space is perceived. Since the Renaissance the Western artist perceived his environment primarily in terms of the visual. Everything was dominated by the eye of the beholder. His conception of space was in terms of a perspective projection upon a plane surface consisting of formal units of spatial measurement. He accepted the dominance of the vertical and the horizontal - of symmetry - as an absolute condition of order. This view is deeply embedded in the consciousness of Western art.

Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, The medium is the massage, A penguin book, 1967, p. 57.

civil war

Il is a mette of the greatest urgency that our educational institutions realize that we now have civil war among these environments created by media other than the printed word. The classroom is now in a vital struggle for survival with the immensely persuasive “outside” world created by new informational media. Education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery - to probing and exploration and to the recognition of the language of forms.

Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, The medium is the massage, A penguin book, 1967, p. 100.

printing

Printing, a ditto device confirmed and extended the new visual stress. It provided the first unifomly repeatable “commodity”, the first assembly line—mass production.

It created the portable book, which men could read in privacy and in isolation form others. Man could now inspire—and conspire.

Like easel painting, the printed book added much to the new cult of individualism. The private, fixed point of view became possible and literacy conferred the power of detachment, non-involvement.

Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, The medium is the massage, A penguin book, 1967, p. 50.

Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage, A penguin book, 1967, via eureka-eureka.com

media

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.

Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, The medium is the massage, A penguin book, 1967, p. 26.