A dose of McLuhan

Remember Marshall McLuhan? To be honest, the Roman Catholic English prof is not an easy, limpid read.

Over at his official site, emblazoned by that watershed adage "I may be wrong but I'm never in doubt," they list a few quotes as worm on a hook, which they call "Marshall McLuhanisms":

Here are my favorites (the last one is mine -- couldn't resist):

• Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.
• The nature of people demands that most of them be engaged in the most frivolous possible activities—like making money.
• With telephone and TV it is not so much the message as the sender that is “sent.”
• Money is the poor man’s credit card (I don't think that's true anymore, unless one wants to stipulate the dark notion that under universal debt, everyone is poor).
• Invention is the mother of necessities.
• You mean my whole fallacy’s wrong?
• Mud sometimes gives the illusion of depth.
• The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
• The trouble with a cheap, specialized education is that you never stop paying for it.
• People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.
• The road is our major architectural form.
• Today each of us lives several hundred years in a decade.
• Today the business of business is becoming the constant invention of new business.
• The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.
• News, far more than art, is artifact.
• When you are on the phone or on the air, you have no body.
• All advertising advertises advertising.
• The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.
• “Camp” is popular because it gives people a sense of reality to see a replay of their lives.
• The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.
• The missing link created far more interest than all the chains and explanations of being.
• When a thing is current, it creates currency.
• Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.
• The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially.
• A road is a flattened-out wheel, rolled up in the belly of an airplane.
• At the speed of light, policies and political parties yield place to charismatic images.
• “I may be wrong, but I’m never in doubt.”
• Men on frontiers, whether of time or space, abandon their previous identities. Neighborhood gives identity. Frontiers snatch it away.
• The modern world, now, is all frontier. Neighborhood must be constantly sought, deliberately nurtured, for humanity to return. The Church is the only neighborhood left.
  

Comments

[Bruce]

Thanks.