McLuhan,
Tranquilizers enable people to persist in their ordinary activities while leading lives of howling desperation. (p. 16)
At slow rates of change the maladjusted person is a local “character.” At high speeds he is a neurotic menace. (p. 16)
The cultural bias of communication manifests itself in unexpected ways. Natives use movie cameras as if the camera were a hand rather than an eye. They follow processes rather than takings shots. (p. 22)
The steamship and the railroad created the centralized metropolis. The motorcar dismembered it into suburbia. The jet plane simply by-passes it, leaving it to become a ghetto. (p. 22)
War and violence result from breakdowns in conventional images of identity. (p. 28)
As any executive climbs up the echelons of the organization chart, his involvement in the organization becomes less and less. (p. 30)
At the top he is a dropout, like the head of a country. (p. 30)
If psychoanalysis was the need for emotional adjustment resulting from accelerated social change, operation research forced creativity upon the entire business world because of the need to anticipate problems with solutions. (p. 32)
Even as war is an accelerated and compulsory education program for friend and foe alike, so education today have become an all-out technological war on our culture and psyches. (p. 40)
Poets and artists live on frontiers. They have no feedback, only feedforward. They have no identities. They are probes. (p. 44)
The poet dislocates language into meaning. The artist smashes open the doors of perception. (p. 44)
Art is new perception. New art opens new worlds for our recognition and nourishment. (p. 46)
NBC and CBS could easily become the political “parties” of the future, just as the New York Central and the Pennsylvania railroads were once the political parties of the nineteenth century. (p. 52)
TV means that the Vietnam war is the first to be fought on American soil. Parents can now see their sons killed in living color. All sons become ours on TV. (p. 52)
The great corporations are new tribal families. It was the tribal and feudal family form that was dissolved by “nationalism.” (p. 54)
Violence is the quest for identity. (p. 63)
Every massive technological innovation creates new environments that destroy national and corporate images. (p. 66)
The higher an executive gets inside any big organization, the sooner he drops out; because he has less and less to do with the operation. (p. 78)
The trouble with a cheap, specialized education is that you never stop paying for it. (p. 80)
Our teeth are an order than threatens the chaotic world outside. (p. 90)
Smoothness and repetitive order, the attributes of teeth, enter into the very nature of the power structure. (p. 90)
Games are the mask of the crowd. Their dynamic is towards increase. They drive to win. Each nation’s popular games project the image of its central dynamism. (p. 118)
The road is our major architectural form. (p. 132)
Like all old gaps, the one between producer and consumer is closing. Production is more and more incidental to information. The factory depends upon it as much as the DNA particle. The consumer depends on symbolic data to direct his energies, too. Ideas have become the main ingredient of the new economy. (p. 138)
Perception or input is never the experience of “closure.” No matter which sense receives the data the other sense rally to complement it. (p. 186)
New art is sensory violence on the frontiers of experience. (p. 186)
Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. We “lose touch” without it. Visual space is the space of detachment and the public precautions we call “scientific method” and scholarly or citational erudition. (p. 194)
Most people prefer to go along for the ride on any trend whatever. A rudder needs to be anti-current. (p. 226)
The modern world is acoustic and tribal because it lives in an all-at-once time and space. The need to escape from Now can only be through the looking glass into a timeless world of déjà vu, which is not unlike the stone age world of ads provided by Madison Avenue. (p. 240)
News is now making, not matching. The news of the sponsors is, at least, as central to decision-making as the news of the press. Another gap has closed. (p. 272)
Slang is verbal violence on new psychic frontiers. It is a quest for identity. (p. 288)
New technologies = new environments, new social dress. (Greek word perivallo to hit from all sides.) New environments stun men. They are the Emperor’s new clothes. (p. 302)
Oral societies regard environment as art. Artists and archaeologists see a world of order and significant social gesture in any midden heap (p. 312)
When images of identity are endangered, violence begins. (p. 312)