Probes

Northrop Frye

154. Technology somehow defined to people who they were, or at least how they saw themselves, in addition to its impact on what they produced. - Peter Drucker

155. The interaction between the "medium" and the "message" is more profound than McLuhan's aphorism has it; neither determines the other, but each shapes the other. - Peter Drucker

156. McLuhan has become known -- and may even see himself -- as the pop culture's Thoreau. - Peter Drucker

157. McLuhan's most important insight is that technology is an extension of man rather than "just a tool." It is not "man's Master." - Peter Drucker

158. Man alone is capable of purposeful non-organic evolution; he makes tools. - Alfred Russel Wallace

159. The human body is the magazine of inventions... All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

160. Printing, like writing, was obsolesced (not obsoleted) by new media. - M.M./B.N.

161. Today, we can predict with certainty that the future of economics is politics, and of politics show business. - B.N. and M. McLuhan

162. Aphorisms, representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire farther; whereas Methods, carrying the show of a total, do secure men, as if they were at farthest. - Francis Bacon

163. McLuhan favoured "aphorisms" to stimulate fresh discovery rather than "methods" to consolidate old knowledge. - B.N.

164. He was celebrated for the wrong reasons in the sixties, and then neglected for the wrong reasons later, so that a reassessment of McLuhan's work and its value is badly needed. - Northrop Frye