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

The capitulation of Western man to his technology, with its crescendo of specialized demands, has always appeared to many observers of our world as a kind of enslavement

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

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.

pictographic and hieroglyphic writing as used in Babylonian, Mayan, and Chinese cultures represents an extension of the visual sense for storing and expediting access to human experience.

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.

To behold, use or perceive any extension of ourselves in technological form is necessarily to embrace it.

Western man acquired from the technology of literacy the power to act without reacting

the American Presidency has become very much more personal and monarchical than any European monarch ever could be.

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