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McLUHAN
Spoken word is mirror of the mind: canon is mirror of the voice, when one voice repeats or reflects what another has stated. GV-MMBP-171
There is a fascinating example in Milton's Paradise Lost of the process of intellectual anesthesia. Milton's problem, which is that of orthodox theology, is to explain how Satan, who has supreme created intelligence, should immediately be able to intuit the results of any sin. Therefore the problem is: how can he be said to commit sin and be of high order of intelligence? Milton solves this problem wittily by showing how Satan uses language to obscure his thinking. CA-MMWW-14
Imagination is that ratio among the perceptions and faculties which exists when they are not embedded or outered in material technologies. When so outered, each sense and faculty becomes a closed system. GG-MM-314
The Analogical Mirrors. IL-MM-63
If a language contrived and used by many people is a mass medium, any one of our new media is in a sense a new language, a new codification of experience collectively achieved by new work habits and inclusive collective awareness. But when such a new codification has reached the technological stage of communicability and repeatability, has it not, like a spoken tongue, also become a macromyth? How much compression of the elements of a process must occur before one can say that they are certainly in mythic form? Are we inclined to insist that myth be a reduction of collective experience to a visual and classifiable form?
Languages old and new, as macromyths, have that relation to words and word-making that characterizes the fullest scope of myth. The collective skills and experience that constitute both spoken languages and such new languages as movies or radio can also be considered with preliterate myths as static models of the universe. But do they not tend, like languages in general, to be dynamic models of the universe in action? As such, languages old and new would seem to be for participation rather than for contemplation or for reference and classification. MY-MM-340
Here is the prologue to the drama of Big Brother Watching You that later unfolds in the Tatler and the Spectator (lo spettatore nel centro del quadro). VP-MMHP-109 (this probe is collated with the Portrait of the Countess of Meath by Peter Lely)
This externalization of our senses creates what de Chardin calls the "noosphere" or a technological brain for the world. Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. GG-MM-44
Utopians and antiutopians are always obsessed with a period preceding their own. Orwell's 1984 happened in 1930. TT-MMBN-75
Not Big Brother Is Watching But All The Brothers. VV-MM-Item 15
Electric information environments being utterly ethereal fosters the illusion of the world as spiritual substance. It is now a reasonable facsimile of the mystical body, a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ. After all, the Prince of this World is a very great electric engineer. LT-MM-370
There is no harm in reminding ourselves from time to time that the "Prince of this World" is a great P.R. man, a great salesman of new hardware and software, a great electric engineer, and a great master of the media. It is His master stroke to be not only environmental but invisible, for the environmental is invincibly persuasive when ignored. LT-MM-387
Current illusion is that science has abolished all natural laws. Nature now pays 5 million %. Applied science now the master usurer. To hell with our top soil. We can grow potatoes on the moon tomorrow. How you goan to expose that while there is still human "life" on the planet? LT-MM-219
LIFE Jan1/51 War assets issue. Pin-up girls featured as major asset. I have tried, in forthcoming (March) Mechanical Bride to devise a technique for elucidating this scene. It can't be satirized. Trouble with duffers like Geo. Orwell is that they satirize something that happened 50 yrs ago as a threat of the future ! Effect is narcotic. LT-MM-219
Wyndham Lewis's The Art of Being Ruled ... is probably the most radical political document since Machiavelli's Prince. But whereas Machiavelli was concerned with the use of society as raw material for the arts of power, Lewis reverses the perspective and tries to discern the human shape once more in a vast technological landscape which has been ordered on Machiavellian lines. LT-MM-222
Surely, it is not unbelievable that decision-makers are totally out of touch with the world they live in? How could any contemporary person in any age be entrusted with powers carefully developed and monopolized by people from the previous time? CO-MM-104
Overkill, the technologies for total destruction of mankind and the planet, create a "peace" that passeth all technology. Bernard Mandeville built his Fable of the Bees on the same observation: "Private vices, public benefits". CA-MMWW-46
With the coming of film and TV, representative government itself has been transformed into image-making, a subculture of Madison Avenue PR. The American dream that has been scrapped is, of course, that of "the open road", which has now merged with jet city. CA-MMWW-139
Disarmament is illogical and futile, unless one is prepared to regard the available means of production and social organization as affording unique social ends. To divert electrical energy and circuitry into atomic bombs shows the same imaginative power as wiring the dining-room chairs to enable one to electrocute the sitter in the event that he might prove hostile. It is part of the age-old habit of using new means for old purposes instead of discovering what are the new goals contained in the new means. CA-MMWW-202
It will take the hijacking of 5,000 Boeing 747s to equal the simple hijack of a single small city, destination unknown. Both hijackers impose their preferences on service environments designed for others - and hijack can be applied to any environment - the air, a business, a culture or the nation itself.
Hijacking a business is easier in proportion to the size of the business, as witness the Pennsylvania Central where $7 billion of assets had been hijacked by the bookkeepers to non-transportation uses. The bigger the operation, the less the shareholders know about the flight plan. Hijackers don't presume to have expertise. They allow the plane, or the business, or the country that they take over, to be operated by those normally in charge. The hijacker does not interfere with the operation, but with the flight plan. He decides where to land. GR-MM-111
The owners themselves are concerned more about the media as such, and are not inclined to go beyond "what the public wants" or some vague formula. Owners are aware of the media as power, and they know that this power has little to do with "content" or the media within the media. UM-MM-60
Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly. Something like this has already happened with outer space, for the same reasons that we have leased our central nervous systems to various corporations. As long as we adopt the Narcissus attitude of regarding the extensions of our own bodies as really out there and really independent of us, we will meet all technological challenges with the same sort of banana-skin pirouette and collapse. UM-MM-73
Marx shared with economists then and since the inability to make his concepts include innovational processes. It is one thing to spot a new product but quite another to observe the invisible new environments generated by the action of the product on a variety of pre-existing social grounds. TT-MMBN-63
Electrotechnics scrapped the Westerner's industrial technology and retrieved and flooded him with the primitive modes of awareness of preliterate man. That is why all bureaucracies of all sovereign and national entities have collapsed in the West. It is the speed-up of information by telephone and telex, etc., that destroys bureaucracies regardless of geography or ideology. China and Russia, as much as France and the U.S.A., experience this collapse at the same time. MR-MMGK-3
Everyone will be involved in role-playing, including those few elitists who interpret and/or manage large-scale data patterns and thus control the functions of a speed-of-light society. JC-MMBP-199
The automated presidential surrogate is the superlative nobody. TT-MMBN-157
Henry Kissinger seems to be the current triggerman in this planetary game among the intervals of the first, second, third and fourth worlds, the first world being the industrialized West, the second being Russian Socialism, the third the nonindustrialized lands, and the fourth the electric world that has gone around the rest, becoming the primum mobile of inflation in all the rest. MI-MMBN-L29
The information environment of the electric world has increasingly merged private and public sectors of the older industrial world, pushing the world of staples and commodities out of the marketplace and into the political sphere. For banking, the question today would seem to be what is its new role in a world where information is superseding hardware and in which politics has become a major form of show business? As show business becomes world business, the banker will experience an enormous extension of his advisory role in the political and bureaucratic sphere. The development of banking will be, not toward the take-over of business, but of politics. CN-MM-x&xi
In Catch-22, the figure of the black market and the ground of war merge into a monster presided over by the syndicate. When war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood. TT-MMBN-211
Old colonialism exploited the raw materials, i.e., "hardware". New colonialism exploits productive capacity and skilled management and labor, i.e., "software". Economic nationalism of governments is thus defeated by economic inter-nationalism of corporations. What is good for General Motors may ultimately be great for everybody but the United States. TT-MMBN-196
Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity. TT-MMBN-92
Today, apart from government itself, the biggest show business is putting "secrets" on display: whether of the CIA, FBI, KGB, MI5, or Watergate - not like Perry Mason, but the "real McCoy" - as Nature imitates Art. Private history "in camera" has become public myth by time compression "on camera", just as the hitherto ob-scene is now on stage: a deja vu of all times and places now here. By recognizing this cliche´-archetype pattern, we can "prophesy" what has already happened: Scenarios, obsolescent at peak performance, will proliferate as art forms, while present action moves from sequent play to simultaneous interplay and instant replay. KP-BN-129
One of the many flips of our time is that the electric information environment returns man to the condition of the most primitive prober and hunter. Privacy invasion is now one of our biggest knowledge industries. CO-MM-24
He (Douglas Cater) emphasizes the paradox that the press is dedicated to the process of cleansing by publicity, and yet that, in the electronic world of the seamless web of events, most affairs must be kept secret. Top secrecy is translated into public participation and responsibility by the magic flexibility of the controlled news leak. UM-MM-190
When the electric speed is introduced into such a delegated and representational organization, this obsolescent organization can only be made to function by a series of subterfuges and makeshifts. These strike some observers as base betrayals of the original aims and purposes of the established forms. UM-MM-182&183
The maintenance of social power is, in fact, the manifestation of social identity. TT-MMBN-261
The superenterprise, like the superaudience, works for itself. TT-MMBN-205
"The computer is the first machine that consumes and produces the same material - information. - William Jovanovich" TT-MMBN-90
The new overkill is simply an extension of our nervous system into a total ecological service environment. Such a service environment can liquidate or terminate its beneficiaries as naturally as it sustains them. TT-MMBN-152
The more you create village conditions, the more discontinuity and division and diversity. The global village absolutely insures maximal disagreement on all points. It never occurred to me that uniformity and tranquillity were the properties of the global village. It has more spite and envy. The spaces and times are pulled out from between people. A world in which people encounter each other in depth all the time. The tribal-global village is far more divisive - full of fighting - than any nationalism ever was. Village is fission, not fusion, in depth. HC-MMGS-279&280
The student of media soon comes to expect the new media of any period whatever to be classed as pseudo by those who have acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be. This would seem to be a normal, and even amiable, trait ensuring a maximal degree of social continuity and permanence amidst change and innovation. But all the conservatism in the world does not afford even a token resistance to the ecological sweep of the new electric media. On a moving highway the vehicle that backs up is accelerating in relation to the highway situation. Such would seem to be the ironical status of the cultural reactionary. When the trend is one way his resistance insures a greater speed of change. Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force. UM-MM-179
We torment others by "hardware", using the old organization chart, and we participate in this torment through "software" by holding the new media mirror up to old Nature, as it were. This process transforms the torture of work into the refined torture of art - the primal curse laid on man: he will earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. Today the sweat is empathy, and the self-knowledge that is the most awful form of torment is awareness of one's own sordid motives manifested in their consequences. TT-MMBN-166
We are polluting Art as fast as we are tidying up Nature. TT-MMBN-166
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