The Medium is the Massage

The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the ground rules of the environment. The ground rules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serves as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. (p. 93)

There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening. [A chapter sub-heading attributed by McLuhan to Alfred North Whitehead]

Art is whatever you can get away with.

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog. (p. 48)

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.

Youth instinctively understand the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.

Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.

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 massage. 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. (p. 26)

Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.

Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perception...When these ratios change, men change.

History as she is harped. Rite words in rote order. (pp. 108-109)

In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. (p. 125)

The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. (p. 122)