Marshall McLuhan, W. Terrence Gordon - Understanding Media_ the Extensions of Man_ Critical Edition-Gingko Press

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.

Each new technology creates an environment that is itself regarded as corrupt and degrading. Yet the new one turns its predecessor into an art form.

the man in a literate and homogenized society ceases to be sensitive to the diverse and discontinuous life of forms. He acquires the illusion of the third dimension and the “private point of view” as part of his Narcissus fixation, and is quite shut off from Blake’s awareness or that of the Psalmist, that we become what we behold.

By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms.

For just as a metaphor transforms and transmits experience, so do the media.

Print created individualism and nationalism in the sixteenth century.

Just as speech lost its magic with writing, and further with printing, when printed money supplanted gold, the compelling aura of it disappeared.