There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.
Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.
One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.
Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.
The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.
Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.
A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.
Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. Professionalism 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 ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to loose.
You 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?
... Their power to see environments as they really are.
Technology is that which separates us from our environment.
The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.
Today's child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns subjects, and schedules.
Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception.
Education, which should be helping youth to understand and adapt to their revolutionary new environments, is instead being used merely as an instrument of cultural aggression.
If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.
We have to find the environments in which it will be possible to live with our new inventions.
Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.
As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art.
The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.
Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.
Transmitted at the speed of light, all events on this planet are simultaneous. In the electric environment of information all events are simultaneous, there is no time or space separating events.
Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay.
Professionalism 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.
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