I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand whatโs happening. Because I donโt choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, youโre in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certainly something Iโm resolutely against. And it seems to me the best way to oppose it is to understand it. And then you know where to turn off the buttons.
Marshall McLuhanGramophone and movies were merely the mechanization of speech and gesture. But the radio and TV were not just the electronification of speech and gesture but the electronification of the entire range of human personal expressiveness. With electronification the flow is taken out of the wire and into the vacuum tube circuit, which confers freedom and flexibility such as are in metaphor and in words themselves.
Marshall McLuhanWith the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.
Marshall McLuhan