The Wild Broncos of Technology

Harnessing the Tennessee, Missouri, or Mississippi is kid stuff compared with curbing the movie, press, or television to human ends. The wild broncos of technological culture have yet to find their busters or masters. They have found only their P.T. Barnums.


Marshall McLuhan
Explorations in Communication
1966

Pattern Recognition and a New Religion

Suppose, then, that we view recycling as akin to a religious practice, an organized expression of widely held ecological values. The language and symbolism of recycling support this view. Any church needs ritual observances, and curbside recycling provides the opportunity for the weekly offering and collection. After collection there is the modern miracle of transubstantiation, as old packages and papers come to life again. In states that have deposits on beverage containers, it is common to speak of the process of redemption.


Frank Ackerman, Why Do We Recycle?
1997

The Medium is the Message?

via: James Morrison

Second Nature

The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature.


Marshall McLuhan
Explorations in Communication

The Answer of St. Thomas

When we are confronted by the bold fraud dreamt up by men whose confusion and spiritual frustration is the fruit of Satanic pride, the truth that is in us is made alive and lancing; but when a triumphant technology croons the sickly boasts of the advertising men, when the great vaults and vistas of the human soul are obscured by images of silken glamor, and when it is plain that man lives not by bread alone but by toothpaste also, then we need the answer of St. Thomas. It is the answer of moral and intellectual discipline and ardor.

Marshall McLuhan, 

"Education of Free Men in Democracy," 

in St. Louis University Studies in Honor of St. Thomas Aquinas,

1943

Ends and Education

Every person is by nature capable of determining his or her aims. Anyone who treats a person as the means to an end does violence to the very essence of the other, to what constitutes its natural right. Obviously, we must demand from a person, as a thinking individual, that his or her ends should be genuinely good, since the pursuit of evil ends is contrary to the rational nature of the person. This is also the purpose of education, both the education of children, and the mutual education of adults; it is just that -- a matter of seeking true ends, i.e. real goods as the ends of our actions, and of finding and showing to others the ways to realize them.


Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, 1981

Theory of Environments

Pavlov was the man who tipped us off that our old mechanical environment and its consequences were yielding to a totally new environment created by an antithetic technology. His discovery about conditioning is quite trivial since all Western men have experienced this for centuries. The portentous discovery he made was that any controlled environment, any man-made environment, is a conditioner that creates non-perceptive somnambulists. The fact that a natural or non-controlled environment has quite different effects upon human perception has long agitated the anthropological world. Anthropologists have been led to study the patterns of culture of native societies and the wonderful results of native environments in shaping native institutions, without any corresponding increase of insight into their own culture.

Marshall McLuhan, War and Peace in the Global Village, 1968