Essential McLuhan 282 —1972 The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums…this medium has the power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber.—1964 Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village size, and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumor, and personal malice.—1964 Radio will serve as background-sound or as a noise-level control, as when the ingenious teenager employs it as a means of privacy.—1964 Radio…transforms the relation of everybody to everybody, regardless of programming.—1974 The power of radio to involve people in-depth is manifested in its use during homework by youngsters and by many other people who carry transistor sets in order to provide a private world for themselves amidst crowds.—1964 Radio provided the first massive expe-rience of electronic implosion, that reversal of the entire direction and meaning of literate Western civilization.—1964 Both Hitler and Gandhi, and many others in this century, were made possible by the electric P.A. system and by radio. Anybody who wants to moralize about radio has to dump Gandhi and Hitler into the same pot.— 1970 [F.D.R.] was at great pains to use an unfavourable press to enhance his radio image. The art of politics today requires an orchestral use of the varied instruments of public communication. These instruments do not exist or function in isolation from one another any more than do our senses function in isolation.—1965 It is not easy to explain to a Westerner why oral cultures should be so rabid in their response to radio. The oral man cannot tolerate radio any more than he can tolerate alcohol… His very culture is already profoundly involving, and radio and alcohol excite the tribal membrane of the oral cultures to a morbid degree.—1972 I live right inside radio when I listen. —1964 Radio, in contrast to the telephone, permits the listener to fill in a good deal of visual imagery. The radio-announcer or disc-jockey stands out loud and clear, while the voice on the telephone resonates in isolation from the visual sense. Nobody ever wrote a lament about “All Alone by the Radio” but “All Alone by the Telephone” is a classic of the twenties that was a resounding prophecy of high-rise living in the present time.— 1971 XEROGRAPHY Any notable figure has only to empty his Xeroxed memos into the publisher’s office to have a biography available in a few hours.—1971