The circuited city of the future will not be the huge hunk of concentrated real estate created by the railway. It will take on a totally new meaning under conditions of very rapid movement. It will be an information megalopolis.
Marshall McLuhanYou see, Dad, Professor McLuhan says that the environment that man creates becomes his medium for defining his role in it. The invention of type created linear, or sequential thought, separating thought from action. Now, with TV and folk singing, thought and action are closer and social involvement is greater. We again live in a village. Get it?
Marshall McLuhanAs information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art.
Marshall McLuhanPositively, the effect of speeding up temporal sequence is to abolish time, much as the telegraph and cable abolished space. Of course, the photograph does both.
Marshall McLuhanProfessionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and specialise, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The 'expert' is the man who stays put.
Marshall McLuhan