Understanding Media Quotes

“As forms, as media, the book and the newspaper would seem to be as incompatible as any two media could be. The owners of media always endeavor to give the public what it wants, because they sense that their power is in the medium and not in the message or the program.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The format of the press — that is, its structural characteristics — were quite naturally taken over by the poets after Baudelaire in order to evoke an inclusive awareness. Our ordinary newspaper page today is not only symbolist and surrealist in an avant-garde way, but it was the earlier inspiration of symbolism and surrealism in art and poetry, as anybody can discover by reading Flaubert or Rimbaud. Approached as newspaper form, any part of Joyce’s Ulysses or any poem of T. S. Eliot’s before the Quartets is more readily enjoyed. Such, however, is the austere continuity of book culture that it scorns to notice these liaisons dangéreuses among the media, especially the scandalous affairs of the book-page with electronic creatures from the other side of the linotype.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Here I must repeat that the newspaper, from its beginnings, has tended, not to the book form, but to the mosaic or participational form. With the speedup of printing and news-gathering, this mosaic form has become a dominant aspect of human association; for the mosaic form means, not a detached “point of view,” but participation in process. For that reason, the press is inseparable from the democratic process, but quite expendable from a literary or book point of view.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“For example, in oral Russia both Pravda and Izvestia handle domestic news, but the big international themes come to the West over Radio Moscow. In visual America, radio and television handle the domestic stories, and international affairs get their formal treatment in Time magazine and The New York Times. As a foreign service, the bluntness of Voice of America in no way compares to the sophistication of the BBC and Radio Moscow, but what it lacks in verbal content it makes up in the entertainment value of its American jazz.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the press. Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold. Radio and TV can handle the sports, news, comics, and pictures. The editorial, which is the one book-feature of the newspaper, has been ignored for many years, unless put in the form of news or paid advertisement.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the press. Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“As the book page yields the inside story of the author’s mental adventures, so the press page yields the inside story of the community in action and interaction. It is for this reason that the press seems to be performing its function most when revealing the seamy side. Real news is bad news — bad news about somebody, or bad news for somebody.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“In diplomacy the same electric speed causes the decisions to be announced before they are made in order to ascertain the varying responses that might occur when such decisions actually are made. Such procedure, quite inevitable at the electric speed that involves the entire society in the decision-making process, shocks the old press men because it abdicates any definite point of view. As the speed of information increases, the tendency is for politics to move away from representation and delegation of constituents toward immediate involvement of the entire community in the central acts of decision.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The complex network of media, other than the photograph that appears in the world of merchandising, is easier to observe in the world of sports. In one instance, the press camera contributed to radical changes in the game of football. A press photo of battered players in a 1905 game between Pennsylvania and Swarthmore came to the attention of President Teddy Roosevelt. He was so angered at the picture of Swarthmore’s mangled Bob Maxwell that he issued an immediate ultimatum — that if rough play continued, he would abolish the game by executive edict.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“To lament that the packaged tour, like the photograph, cheapens and degrades by making all places easy of access, is to miss most of the game. It is to make value judgments with fixed reference to the fragmentary perspective of literary culture. It is the same position that considers a literary landscape as superior to a movie travelogue. For the untrained awareness, all reading and all movies, like all travel are equally banal and unnourishing as experience.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The book reader has always tended to be passive, because that is the best way to read. Today, the traveler has become passive. Given travelers checks, a passport, and a toothbrush, the world is your oyster. The macadam road, the railroad, and the steamship have taken the travail out of travel. People moved by the silliest whims now clutter the foreign places, because travel differs very little from going to a movie or turning the pages of a magazine. The “Go Now, Pay Later” formula of the travel agencies might as well read: “Go now, arrive later,” for it could be argued that such people never really leave their beaten paths of impercipience, nor do they ever arrive at any new place. They can have Shanghai or Berlin or Venice in a package tour that they need never open. In 1961, TWA began to provide new movies for its trans-Atlantic flights so that you could visit Portugal, California, or anywhere else, while en-route to Holland, for example. Thus the world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects that have been encountered before in some other medium.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Daniel Boorstin in The Image: or What Happened to the American Dream offers a conducted literary tour of the new photographic world of travel. One has merely to look at the new tourism in a literary perspective to discover that it makes no sense at all. To the literary man who has read about Europe, in leisurely anticipation of a visit, an ad that whispers: “You are just fifteen gourmet meals from Europe on the world’s fastest ship” is gross and repugnant. Advertisements of travel by plane are worse: “Dinner in New York, indigestion in Paris.” Moreover, the photograph has reversed the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Perhaps the great revolution produced by photograph was in the traditional arts. The painter could no longer depict a world that had been much photographed. He turned, instead, to reveal the inner process of creativity in expressionism and in abstract art. Likewise, the novelist could no longer describe objects or happenings for readers who already knew what was happening by photo, press, film, and radio. The poet and novelist turned to those inward gestures of the mind by which we achieve insight and by which we make ourselves and our world. Thus art moved from outer matching to inner making. Instead of depicting a world that matched the world we already knew, the artists turned to presenting the creative process for public participation. He has given to us now the means of becoming involved in the making-process. Each development of the electric age attracts, and demands, a high degree of producer-orientation.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The age of the photograph has become the age of gesture and mime and dance, as no other age has ever been. Freud and Jung built their observations on the interpretation of the languages of both individual and collective postures and gestures with respect to dreams and to the ordinary acts of everyday life. The physical and psychic gestalts, or “still” shots, with which they worked were much owing to the posture world revealed by the photograph. The photograph is just as useful for collective, as for individual, postures and gestures, whereas written and printed language is biased toward the private and individual posture. Thus, the traditional figures of rhetoric were individual postures of mind of the private speaker in relation to an audience, whereas myth and Jungian archetypes are collective postures of the mind with which the written form could not cope, any more than it could command mime and gesture. Moreover, that the photograph is quite versatile in revealing and arresting posture and structure wherever it is used, occurs in countless examples, such as the analysis of bird-flight. It was the photograph that revealed the secret of bird-flight and enabled man to take off. The photo, in arresting bird-flight, showed that it was based on a principle of wing fixity. Wing movement was seen to be for propulsion, not for flight.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Nobody can commit photography alone. It is possible to have at least the illusion of reading and writing in isolation, but photography does not foster such attitudes. If there is any sense in deploring the growth of corporate and collective art forms such as the film and the press, it is surely in relation to the previous individualist technologies that these new forms corrode. Yet if there had been no prints or woodcuts and engravings, there would never have come the photograph. For centuries, the woodcut and the engraving had delineated the world by an arrangement of lines and points that had syntax of a very elaborate kind. Many historians of this visual syntax, like E. H. Gombrich and William M. Ivins, have been at great pains to explain how the art of the hand-written manuscript had permeated the art of the woodcut and the engraving until, with the halftone process, the dots and lines suddenly fell below the threshold of normal vision. Syntax, the net of rationality, disappeared from the later prints, just as it tended to disappear from the telegraph message and from the impressionist painting. Finally, in the pointillisme of Seurat, the world suddenly appeared through the painting. The direction of a syntactical point of view from outside onto the painting ended as literary form dwindled into headlines with the telegraph. With the photograph, in the same way, men had discovered how to make visual reports without syntax.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“A century ago the British craze for the monocle gave to the wearer the power of the camera to fix people in a superior stare, as if they were objects. Erich von Stroheim did a great job with the monocle in creating the haughty Prussian officer. Both monocle and camera tend to turn people into things, and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise. The movie stars and matinee idols are put in the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and hugged and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Lynn White has much to say, also, about horseshoes and horsecollars as revolutionary technology that increased the power and extended the range and speed of human action in the early Middle Ages. He is sensitive to the psychic and social implications of each technological extension of man, showing how the heavy wheel-plow brought about a new order in the field system, as well as in the diet of that age. “The Middle Ages were literally full of beans.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Those who panic now about the threat of the newer media and about the revolution we are forging, vaster in scope than that of Gutenberg, are obviously lacking in cool visual detachment and gratitude for that most potent gift bestowed on Western man by literacy and typography: his power to act without reaction or involvement. It is this kind of specialization by dissociation that has created Western power and efficiency. Without this dissociation of action from feeling and emotion people are hampered and hesitant. Print taught men to say, “Damn the torpedoes. Full steam ahead!”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Socially, the typographic extension of man brought in nationalism, industrialism, mass markets, and universal literacy and education. For print presented an image of repeatable precision that inspired totally new forms of extending social energies. Print released great psychic and social energies in the Renaissance, as today in Japan or Russia, by breaking the individual out of the traditional group while providing a model of how to add individual to individual in massive agglomeration of power. The same spirit of private enterprise that emboldened authors and artists to cultivate self-expression led other men to create giant corporations, both military and commercial.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Until 1700 much more than 50 per cent of all printed books were ancient or medieval. Not only antiquity but also the Middle Ages were given to the first reading public of the printed word. And the medieval texts were by far the most popular.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The comic strip and the ad, then, both belong to the world of games, to the world of models and extensions of situations elsewhere. MAD magazine, world of the woodcut, the print, and the cartoon, brought them together with other games and models from the world of entertainment. MAD is a kind of newspaper mosaic of the ad as entertainment, and entertainment as a form of madness. Above all, it is a print- and woodcut-form of expression and experience whose sudden appeal is a sure index of deep changes in our culture. Our need now is to understand the formal character of print, comic and cartoon, both as challenging and changing the consumer-culture of film, photo, and press. There is no single approach to this task, and no single observation or idea that can solve so complex a problem in changing human perception.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“It was Al Capp who discovered that until TV, at least, any degree of Scragg mayhem or Phogbound morality was accepted as funny. He didn’t think it was funny. He put in his strip just exactly what he saw around him. But our trained incapacity to relate one situation to another enabled his sardonic realism to be mistaken for humor. The more he showed the capacity of people to involve themselves in hideous difficulties, along with their entire inability to turn a hand to help themselves, the more they giggled.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Picasso has long been a fan of American comics. The highbrow, from Joyce to Picasso, has long been devoted to American popular art because he finds in it an authentic imaginative reaction to official action. Genteel art, on the other hand, tends merely to evade and disapprove of the blatant modes of action in a powerful high definition, or “square,” society. Genteel art is a kind of repeat of the specialized acrobatic feats of an industrialized world. Popular art is the clown reminding us of all the life and faculty that we have omitted from our daily routines. He ventures to perform the specialized routines of the society, acting as integral man. But integral man is quite inept in a specialist situation. This, at least, is one way to get at the art of the comics, and the art of the clown.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“With the arrival of TV and its iconic mosaic image, the everyday life situations began to seem very square, indeed. Al Capp suddenly found that his kind of distortion no longer worked. He felt that Americans had lost their power to laugh at themselves. He was wrong. TV simply involved everybody in everybody more deeply than before. This cool medium, with its mandate of participation in depth, required Capp to refocus the Li’l Abner image. His confusion and dismay were a perfect match for the feelings of those in every major American enterprise. From Life to General Motors, and from the classroom to the Executive Suite, a refocusing of aims and images to permit ever more audience involvement and participation has been inevitable. Capp said: “But now America has changed. The humorist feels the change more, perhaps, than anyone. Now there are things about America we can’t kid.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The art of making pictorial statements in a precise and repeatable form is one that we have long taken for granted in the West. But it is usually forgotten that without prints and blueprints, without maps and geometry, the world of modern sciences and technologies would hardly exist. In the time of Ferdinand and Isabella and other maritime monarchs, maps were top-secret, like new electronic discoveries today. When the captains returned from their voyages, every effort was made by the officers of the crown to obtain both originals and copies of the maps made during the voyage. The result was a lucrative black-market trade, and secret maps were widely sold. The sort of maps in question had nothing in common with those of later design, being in fact more like diaries of different adventures and experiences.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The art of making pictorial statements in a precise and repeatable form is one that we have long taken for granted in the West. But it is usually forgotten that without prints and blueprints, without maps and geometry, the world of modern sciences and technologies would hardly exist. In the time of Ferdinand and Isabella and other maritime monarchs, maps were top-secret, like new electronic discoveries today. When the captains returned from their voyages, every effort was made by the officers of the crown to obtain both originals and copies of the maps made during the voyage.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Primitive man lived in a much more tyrannical cosmic machine than Western literate man has ever invented. The world of the ear is more embracing and inclusive than that of the eye can ever be. The ear is hypersensitive. The eye is cool and detached. The ear turns man over to universal panic while the eye, extended by literacy and mechanical time, leaves some gaps and some islands free from the unremitting acoustic pressure and reverberation.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“With universal literacy, time can take on the character of an enclosed or pictorial space that can be divided and subdivided. It can be filled in. “My schedule is filled up.” It can be kept free: “I have a free week next month.” And as Sebastian de Grazia has shown in Of Time, Work and Leisure, all the free time in the world is not leisure, because leisure accepts neither the division of labor that constitutes “work,” nor the divisions of time that create “full time” and “free time.” Leisure excludes time as a container. Once time is mechanically or visually enclosed, divided, and filled, it is possible to use it more and more efficiently. Time can be transformed into a labor-saving machine, as Parkinson reveals in his famous “Parkinson’s Law.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“John Donne’s poem on “The Sun Rising” exploits the contrast between aristocratic and bourgeois time. The one trait that most damned the bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century was their punctuality, their pedantic devotion to mechanical time and sequential order. As space-time flooded through the gates of awareness from the new electric technology, all mechanical observance became distasteful and even ridiculous. Donne had the same ironic sense of the irrelevance of clock-time, but pretended that in the kingdom of love even the great cosmic cycles of time were also petty aspects of the clock: Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
     Why dost thou thus
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?
     Saucy, pedantic wretch, go chide
     Late school-boys, and sour prentices,
   Go tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride,
     Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Shakespeare’s sonnets are full of the twin themes of immortality of fame conferred by the engine of print, as well as the petty futility of daily existence as measured by the clock: When I doe count the clock that tels the time,
And see the brave day sunck in hidious night …
Then of thy beauty do I question make
That thou among the wastes of time must goe. (“Sonnet X”)”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man