Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.
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Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
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With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life. (p. 177)
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Marlowe anticipated Whitman's barbaric yawp by setting up a national PA system of blank verse – a rising iambic system of sound to suit the new success story. (p. 223)
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All advertising advertises advertising – no ad has its meaning alone. (p. 145)
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Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.
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Bacon's Adam is a medieval mystic and Milton's a trade union organizer. (p. 214)
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Today, computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. (p. 80)
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Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.
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Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies. (p. 86)
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American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.
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In Catch-22, the figure of the black market and the ground of war merge into a monster presided over by the syndicate. When war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood. (p. 211)
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Environments work us over and remake us. It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things. (p. 90)
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Tactility is space of the interval.
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Casting my perils before swains.
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While people are engaged in creating a totally different world, they always form vivid images of the preceding world. (p. 21)
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As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.'
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The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
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Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.
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Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
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The potential of any new technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors. (p. 210)
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PLAYBOY: A Columbia coed was recently quoted in Newsweek as equating you and LSD. 'LSD doesn’t mean anything until you consume it,' she said. 'Likewise McLuhan.' Do you see any similarities?
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The sociologist permits himself to see only what is acceptable to his colleagues. (p. 370)
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Environment is process, not container. (p. 30)