Gramophone 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 McLuhanWhat is very little understood about the electronic age is that it angelizes man, disembodies him. Turns him into software.
Marshall McLuhanI do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.
Marshall McLuhanErwin Schrodinger has explained how he and his fellow physicists had agreed that they would report their new discoveries and experiments in quantum physics in the language of Newtonian physics. That is, they agreed to discuss and report the non-visual, electronic world in the language of the visual world of Newton.
Marshall McLuhan