A Quote by Marshall McLuhan
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.
Related Quotes
No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded.
A wise man should order his interests, and set them all in their proper places. This order is often troubled by greed, which putsus upon pursuing so many things at once that, in eagerness for matters of less consideration, we grasp at trifles, and let go things of greater value.
Presumably, technology has made man increasingly independent of his environment. But, in fact, technology has merely substituted nonrenewable resources for renewables, which is more an increase than a decrease in dependence.
The consideration of man's body has not changed to meet the new conditions of this artificial environment that has replaced his natural one. The result is that of perceptual discord between man and his environment. The effect of this discord is a general deterioration of man's body, the symptoms of which are termed disease.
Man's word is his wand filled with magic and power! Man comes into the world financed by God, with all that he desires or requires already on his pathway. This supply is released through faith and the Spoken Word. If thou canst believe, all things are possible.
History is the long struggle of man, by exercise of his reason, to understand his environment and to act upon it. But the modern period has broadened the struggle in a revolutionary way. Man now seeks to understand, and act on, not only his environment, but himself; and this has added, so to speak, a new dimension to reason and a new dimension to history.
Written words differ from spoken words in being material structures. A spoken word is a process in the physical world, having an essential time-order; a written word is a series of pieces of matter, having an essential space-order.
In order to contract, It is necessary first to expand. In order to weaken, It is necessary first to strengthen. In order to destroy, It is first necessary to promote. In order to grasp, It is necessary first to give. This is called subtle light. The weak and the tender overcome the hard and the strong.
To those who think that all this sounds like science fiction, we point out that yesterday's science fiction is today's fact. The Industrial Revolution has radically altered man's environment and way of life, and it is only to be expected that as technology is increasingly applied to the human body and mind, man himself will be altered as radically as his environment and way of life have been.
The only way in which one can make endurable man's inhumanity to man, and man's destruction of his own environment, is to exemplify in your own lives man's humanity to man and man's reverence for the place in which he lives.
We have to do away with a false and misleading dualism, one which abstracts man on the one hand and technology on the other, as if the two were quite separate kinds of realities.... Man is by nature a technological animal; to be human is to be technological.... When we speak of technology, this is another way of speaking about man himself in one of his manifestations.
Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.
While one man can discover a certain thing by himself, another is never able to understand it, even if taught by means of all possible expressions and metaphors, and during a long period; his mind can in no way grasp it, his capacity is insufficient for it.
Our spoken word first hammers a thing desired into shape. Our continued spoken word brings this shaped substance forth and clothes it with a visible body.
If we apply the term revolution to what happened in North America between 1776 and 1829, it has a special meaning. Normally, the word describes the process by which man transforms himself from one kind of man, living in one kind of society, with one way of looking at the world, into another kind of man, another society, another conception of life.... The American case is different: it is not a question of the Old Man transforming himself into the New, but of the New Man becoming alive to the fact that he is new, that he has been transformed already without his having realized it.
But nature - that is, biological evolution - has not fitted man to any specific environment. On the contrary, ... he has a rather crude survival kit; and yet -this is the paradox of the human condition - one that fits him to all environments. Among the multitude of animals which scamper, fly, burrow and swim around us, man is the only one who is not locked into his environment. His imagination, his reason, his emotional subtlety and toughness, make it possible for him not to accept the environment but to change it.
Related Authors
Auguste Comte Quotes
French
Sociologist
C. Wright Mills Quotes
American
Sociologist
Charles Horton Cooley Quotes
American
Sociologist
Deborah Tannen Quotes
American
Sociologist
Emile Durkheim Quotes
French
Sociologist
Immanuel Wallerstein Quotes
American
Sociologist
Ivan Illich Quotes
American
Sociologist
James W. Loewen Quotes
American
Sociologist
Jane Jacobs Quotes
American
Sociologist
Jean Baudrillard Quotes
French
Sociologist
Lewis Mumford Quotes
American
Sociologist
Matthew Desmond Quotes
American
Sociologist
Peter L. Berger Quotes
Austrian
Sociologist
Samuel P. Huntington Quotes
American
Sociologist
Theodor Adorno Quotes
German
Sociologist
Zygmunt Bauman Quotes
Polish
Sociologist