Understanding Media Quotes

“J. Z. Young, in Doubt and Certainty in Science, explains how electricity is not something that is conveyed by or contained in anything, but is something that occurs when two or more bodies are in special positions. Our language derived from phonetic technology cannot cope with this new view of knowledge. We still talk of electric current “flowing,” or we speak of the “discharge” of electric energy like the lineal firing of guns. But quite as much as with the esthetic magic of painterly power, “electricity is the condition we observe when there are certain spatial relations between things.” The painter learns how to adjust relations among things to release new perception, and the chemist and physicist learn how other relations release other kinds of power.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“From this application of visual, abstract, and uniform units came our Western feeling for time as duration. From our division of time into uniform, visualizable units comes our sense of duration and our impatience when we cannot endure the delay between events. Such a sense of impatience, or of time as duration, is unknown among nonliterate cultures. Just as work began with the division of labor, duration begins with the division of time, and especially with those subdivisions by which mechanical clocks impose uniform succession on the time sense.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Information analysts have come to the conclusion that the degree to which one resource can be substituted for another increases when information increases. As we know more, we rely less on any one food or fuel or raw material. Clothes and furniture can now be made from many different materials. Money, which had been for many centuries the principal transmitter and exchanger of information, is now having its function increasingly transferred to science and automation.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Work,” however, does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor and the specialization of functions and tasks in sedentary, agricultural communities. In the computer age we are once more totally involved in our roles. In the electric age the “job of work” yields to dedication and commitment, as in the tribe.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Money, as a social means of extending and amplifying work and skill in an easily accessible and portable form, lost much of its magical power with the coming of representative money, or paper money. Just as speech lost its magic with writing, and further with printing, when printed money supplanted gold, the compelling aura of it disappeared. Samuel Butler in Erewhon (1872) gave clear indications in his treatment of the mysterious prestige conferred by precious metals. His ridicule of the money medium took the form of presenting the old reverent attitude to money in a new social context. This new kind of abstract, printed money of the high industrial age, however, simply would not sustain the old attitude: This is the true philanthropy. He who makes a colossal fortune in the hosiery trade, and by his energy has succeeded in reducing the price of woollen goods by the thousandth part of a penny in the pound — this man is worth ten professional philanthropists. So strongly are the Erewhonians impressed with this, that if a man has made a fortune of over £20,000 a year they exempt him from all taxation, considering him a work of art, and too precious to be meddled with; they say, “How very much he must have done for society before society could have been prevailed upon to give him so much money”; so magnificent an organization overawes them; they regard it as a thing dropped from heaven. “Money,” they say, “is the symbol of duty, it is the sacrament of having done for mankind that which mankind wanted. Mankind may not be a very good judge, but there is no better.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Money, as a social means of extending and amplifying work and skill in an easily accessible and portable form, lost much of its magical power with the coming of representative money, or paper money. Just as speech lost its magic with writing, and further with printing, when printed money supplanted gold, the compelling aura of it disappeared. Samuel Butler in Erewhon (1872) gave clear indications in his treatment of the mysterious prestige conferred by precious metals. His ridicule of the money medium took the form of presenting the old reverent attitude to money in a new social context. This new kind of abstract, printed money of the high industrial age, however, simply would not sustain the old attitude: This is the true philanthropy. He who makes a colossal fortune in the hosiery trade, and by his energy has succeeded in reducing the price of woollen goods by the thousandth part of a penny in the pound — this man is worth ten professional philanthropists. So strongly are the Erewhonians impressed with this, that if a man has made a fortune of over £20,000 a year they exempt him from all taxation, considering him a work of art, and too precious to be meddled with; they say, “How very much he must have done for society before society could have been prevailed upon to give him so much money”; so magnificent an organization overawes them; they regard it as a thing dropped from heaven.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Money, as a social means of extending and amplifying work and skill in an easily accessible and portable form, lost much of its magical power with the coming of representative money, or paper money. Just as speech lost its magic with writing, and further with printing, when printed money supplanted gold, the compelling aura of it disappeared. Samuel Butler in Erewhon (1872) gave clear indications in his treatment of the mysterious prestige conferred by precious metals. His ridicule of the money medium took the form of presenting the old reverent attitude to money in a new social context. This new kind of abstract, printed money of the high industrial age, however, simply would not sustain the old attitude:”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Like any other medium, it is a staple, a natural resource. As an outward and visible form of the urge to change and to exchange, it is a corporate image, depending on society for its institutional status. Apart from communal participation, money is meaningless, as Robinson Crusoe discovered when he found the coins in the wrecked ship: I smiled to myself at the sight of this money. “O drug!” said I aloud, “What are thou good for? Thou art not worth to me—no, not the taking off the ground: one of those knives is worth all this heap: I have no manner of use for thee; e’en remain where thou art and, go to the bottom, as a creature whose life is not worth saving.” However, upon second thoughts, I took it away; and wrapping it all in a piece of canvas, I began to think of making another raft … Primitive commodity money, like the magical words of nonliterate society, can be a storehouse of power, and has often become the occasion of feverish economic activity. The natives of the South Seas, when they are so engaged, seek no economic advantage. Furious application to production may be followed by deliberate destruction of the products in order to achieve moral prestige. Even in these “potlatch” cultures, however, the effect of the currencies was to expedite and to accelerate human energies in a way that had become universal in the ancient world with the technology of the phonetic alphabet. Money, like writing, has the power to specialize and to rechannel human energies and to separate functions, just as it translates and reduces one kind of work to another. Even in the electronic age it has lost none of this power.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“There is, also, the ritualistic exposure of the body indoors and out-of-doors. Psychologists have long taught us that much of our hearing takes place through the skin itself. After centuries of being fully clad and of being contained in uniform visual space, the electric age ushers us into a world in which we live and breathe and listen with the entire epidermis. Of course, there is much zest of novelty in this cult, and the eventual equilibrium among the senses will slough off a good deal of the new ritual, both in clothing and in housing. Meantime, in both new attire and new dwellings, our unified sensibility cavorts amidst a wide range of awareness of materials and colors which makes ours one of the greatest ages of music, poetry, painting, and architecture alike.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“As one aspect of perspective and printing, mathematical or numerical infinity serves as an instance of how our various physical extensions or media act upon one another through the agency of our own senses. It is in this mode that man appears as the reproductive organ of the technological world, a fact that Samuel Butler bizarrely announced in Erewhon.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Wayne and Shuster, the comedian team, never fail to get a good laugh when they line up a group of ancient Roman cops in togas and have them number themselves from left to right, uttering Roman numerals. This joke demonstrates how the pressure of numbers caused men to seek ever more streamlined methods of numeration. Before the advent of ordinal, successive, or positional numbers, rulers had to count large bodies of soldiery by displacement methods. Sometimes they were herded by groups into spaces of approximately known area. The method of having them march in file and of dropping pebbles into containers was another method not unrelated to the abacus and the counting board. Eventually the method of the counting board gave rise to the great discovery of the principle of position in the early centuries of our era. By simply putting 3 and 4 and 2 in position on the board, one after another, it was possible to step up the speed and potential of calculation fantastically. The discovery of calculation by positional numbers rather than by merely additive numbers led, also, to the discovery of zero. Mere positions for 3 and 2 on the board created ambiguities about whether the number was 32 or 302. The need was to have a sign for the gaps between numbers. It was not till the thirteenth century that sifr, the Arab word for “gap” or “empty,” was Latinized and added to our culture as “cipher” (ziphrium) and finally became the Italian zero. Zero really meant a positional gap. It did not acquire the indispensable quality of “infinity” until the rise of perspective and “vanishing point” in Renaissance painting. The new visual space of Renaissance painting affected number as much as lineal waiting had done centuries earlier.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“For writing is only the principal manifestation of the extension of our visual sense, as the photograph and the movie today may well remind us. And long before literate technology, the binary factors of hands and feet sufficed to launch man on the path of counting. Indeed, the mathematical Leibniz saw in the mystic elegance of the binary system of zero and 1 the image of Creation. The unity of the Supreme Being operating in the void by binary function would, he felt, suffice to make all beings from the void.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Correspondence and succession, the two principles which permeate all mathematics—nay, all realms of exact thought — are woven into the very fabric of our number system,” he observes. So, indeed, are they woven into the very fabric of Western logic and philosophy. We have already seen how the phonetic technology fostered visual continuity and individual point of view, and how these contributed to the rise of uniform Euclidean space. Dantzig says that it is the idea of correspondence which gives us cardinal numbers. Both of these spatial ideas — lineality and point of view — come with writing, especially with phonetic writing; but neither is necessary in our new mathematics and physics. Nor is writing necessary to an electric technology.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The most primitive tribes of Australia and Africa, like the Eskimos of today, have not yet reached finger-counting, nor do they have numbers in series. Instead they have a binary system of independent numbers for one and two, with composite numbers up to six. After six, they perceive only “heap.” Lacking the sense of series, they will scarcely notice when two pins have been removed from a row of seven. They become aware at once, however, if one pin is missing. Tobias Dantzig, who investigated these matters, points out (in Number: The Language of Science) that the parity or kinesthetic sense of these people is stronger than their number sense. It is certainly an indication of a developing visual stress in a culture when number appears. A closely integrated tribal culture will not easily yield to the separatist visual and individualistic pressures that lead to the division of labor, and then to such accelerated forms as writing and money. On the other hand, Western man, were he determined to cling to the fragmented and individualist ways that he has derived from the printed word in particular, would be well advised to scrap all his electric technology since the telegraph.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The “infinity of functional processes,” into which Spengler gloomily saw traditional number and geometry dissolving, is, also, the extension of our central nervous system in electrical technologies. We need not feel grateful to apocalyptic writers like Spengler, who see our technologies as cosmic visitors from outer space. The Spenglers are tribally entranced men who crave the swoon back into collective unconsciousness and all the intoxication of number. In India the idea of darshan — of the mystical experience of being in very large gatherings — stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Western idea of conscious values.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Like money and clocks and all other forms of measurement, numbers acquired a separate life and intensity with the growth of literacy. Nonliterate societies had small use for numbers, and today the nonliterate digital computer substitutes “yes” and “no” for numbers. The computer is strong on contours, weak on digits. In effect, then, the electric age brings number back into unity with visual and auditory experience, for good or ill.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Baudelaire had the true intuition of number as a tactile hand or nervous system for interrelating separate units, when he said that “number is within the individual. Intoxication is a number.” That explains why “the pleasure of being in a crowd is a mysterious expression of delight in the multiplication of number.” Number, that is to say, is not only auditory and resonant, like the spoken word, but originates in the sense of touch, of which it is an extension. The statistical aggregation or crowding of numbers yields the current cave-drawings or finger-paintings of the statisticians’ charts. In every sense, the amassing of numbers statistically gives man a new influx of primitive intuition and magically subconscious awareness, whether of public taste or feeling: “You feel better satisfied when you use well-known brands.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The private sponge and the collective sponge, both reaching out for their rations of sensation, achieved a horrible distinctness and clarity that matched the raw power of the predatory army machine. With the cutting-off of the supplies of papyrus by the Mohammedans, the Mediterranean, long a Roman lake, became a Muslim lake, and the Roman center collapsed. What had been the margins of this center-margin structure became independent centers on a new feudal, structural base. The Roman center collapsed by the fifth century a.d. as wheel, road, and paper dwindled into a ghostly paradigm of former power.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The Greek word ponos, or “toil,” was a term used by Hippocrates, the father of medicine, to describe the fight of the body in disease. Today this idea is called homeostasis, or equilibrium as a strategy of the staying power of any body. All organizations, but especially biological ones, struggle to remain constant in their inner condition amidst the variations of outer shock and change. The man-made social environment as an extension of man’s physical body is no exception. The city, as a form of the body politic, responds to new pressures and irritations by resourceful new extensions — always in the effort to exert staying power, constancy, equilibrium, and homeostasis.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The point of the matter of speedup by wheel, road and paper is the extension of power in an ever more homogenous and uniform space. This the real potential of the Roman technology was not realized until printing had given road and wheel a much greater speed than that of the Roman vortex. Yet the speedup of the electronic age is as disrupting for literate, lineal, and Western man as the Roman paper routes were for tribal villagers. Our speedup today is not a slow explosion outward from center to margins but an instant implosion and an interfusion of space and functions. Our specialist and fragmented civilization of center-margin structure is suddenly experiencing an instantaneous reassembling of all its mechanized bits into an organic whole. This is the new world of the global village.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“It was not until the advent of the telegraph that messages could travel faster than a messenger. Before this, roads and the written word were closely interrelated. It is only since the telegraph that information has detached itself from such solid commodities as stone and papyrus, much as money had earlier detached itself from hides, bullion, and metals, and has ended as paper. The term “communication” has had an extensive use in connection with roads and bridges, sea routes, rivers, and canals, even before it became transformed into “information movement” in the electric age. Perhaps there is no more suitable way of defining the character of the electric age than by first studying the rise of the idea of transportation as communication, and then the transition of the idea from transport to information by means of electricity”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Tribal cultures like those of the Indian and the Chinese may be greatly superior to the Western cultures, in the range and delicacy of their perceptions and expression.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“It is the extension of man in speech that enables the intellect to detach itself from the vastly wider reality. Without language, Bergson suggests, human intelligence would have remained totally involved in the objects of its attention. Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement. Language extends and amplifies man but it also divides his faculties. His collective consciousness or intuitive awareness is diminished by this technical extension of consciousness that is speech.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. One of the merits of motivation research has been the revelation of man’s sex relation to the motor car.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Blake, in a word, sees man as fragmented by his technologies. But he insists that these technologies are self-amputations of our own organs. When so amputated, each organ becomes a closed system of great new intensity that hurls man into “martyrdoms and wars.” Moreover, Blake announces as his theme in Jerusalem the organs of perception: If Perceptive Organs vary, Objects of Perception seem to vary:
If Perceptive Organs close, their Objects seem to close also. To behold, use or perceive any extension of ourselves in technological form is necessarily to embrace it.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“In America, the intensely visual culture, TV has opened the doors of audile-tactile perception to the non-visual world of spoken languages and food and the plastic arts. As an extension and expediter of the sense life, any medium at once affects the entire field of the senses, as the Psalmist explained long ago in the 113th Psalm: Their idols are silver and gold,
The work of men’s hands.
They have mouths, but they speak not;
Eyes they have, but they see not;
They have ears, but they hear not;
Noses have they, but they smell not;
They have hands, but they handle not;
Feet have they, but they walk not;
Neither speak they through their throat.
They that make them shall be like unto them;
Yea, every one that trusteth in them.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The effect of radio on literate or visual man was to reawaken his tribal memories, and the effect of sound added to motion pictures was to diminish the role of mime, tactility, and kinesthesis. Similarly, when nomadic man turned to sedentary and specialist ways, the senses specialized too. The development of writing and the visual organization of life made possible the discovery of individualism, introspection and so on.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The person who falls suddenly experiences immunity to all pain or sensory stimuli because the central nervous system has to be protected from any intense thrust of sensation. Only gradually does he regain normal sensitivity to sights and sounds, at which time he may begin to tremble and perspire and to react as he would have done if the central nervous system had been prepared in advance for the fall that occurred unexpectedly.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“There is a close parallel of response between the patterns of physical and psychic trauma or shock. A person suddenly deprived of loved ones and a person who drops a few feet unexpectedly will both register shock. Both the loss of family and a physical fall are extreme instances of amputations of the self. Shock induces a generalized numbness or an increased threshold to all types of perception. The victim seems immune to pain or sense.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Therapy, whether physical or social, is a counter-irritant that aids in that equilibrium of the physical organs which protect the central nervous system. Whereas pleasure is a counter-irritant (e.g., sports, entertainment, and alcohol), comfort is the removal of irritants. Both pleasure and comfort are strategies of equilibrium for the central nervous system.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man