110+ Marshall McLuhan Quotes On Media, Technology And Technology

Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher and professor of English literature. He is best known for his theories of media, communication, and technology, which he coined as the "global village". He was one of the first to theorize the effects of electronic media on culture and society, and his work had a major impact on media studies. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Marshall McLuhan on media, media, technology.

Top 10 Marshall McLuhan Quotes

1. There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
2. World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.
3. There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
4. Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.
5. Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.
6. Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.
7. The computer is the most extraordinary of man's technological clothing; it's an extension of our central nervous system. Beside it, the wheel is a mere hula-hoop.
8. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
9. The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.
10. In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.

Marshall McLuhan Image Quotes

There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew. — Marshall McLuhan

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy. — Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan Short Quotes

• The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
• We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
• Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
• Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.
• I don't necessarily agree with everything that I say.
• A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
• It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudosimplicities of brutal directness.
• We go forward looking in the rearview mirror.
• Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.
• Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.

Marshall McLuhan Quotes About Media

The alphabet was one thing when applied to clay or stone, and quite another when set down on light papyrus. — Marshall McLuhan

The suddenness of the leap from hardware to software cannot but produce a period of anarchy and collapse, especially in the developed countries. — Marshall McLuhan

Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally. — Marshall McLuhan

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. — Marshall McLuhan

The poet, the artist, the sleuth, whoever sharpens our perception tends to antisocial; rarely 'well adjusted,' he cannot go along with currents and trends. — Marshall McLuhan

The movie, by sheer speeding up of the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configurations and structure. — Marshall McLuhan

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. — Marshall McLuhan

Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression. — Marshall McLuhan

The new media are not ways of relating to us the 'real' world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will. — Marshall McLuhan

All the new media are art forms which have the power of imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions. — Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan Quotes About Technology

The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age. — Marshall McLuhan

Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the "Tower of Babel" by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant tr — Marshall McLuhan

The age of automation is going to be the age of "do it yourself". — Marshall McLuhan

The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb. — Marshall McLuhan

The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times. — Marshall McLuhan

Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy. — Marshall McLuhan

Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition. — Marshall McLuhan

We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies. — Marshall McLuhan

Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's jobs with yesterday's tools. — Marshall McLuhan

The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement. — Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan Quotes About Culture

The school system, custodian of print culture, has no place for the rugged individual. It is, indeed, the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing. — Marshall McLuhan

Education, which should be helping youth to understand and adapt to their revolutionary new environments, is instead being used merely as an instrument of cultural aggression. — Marshall McLuhan

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it. — Marshall McLuhan

Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture. — Marshall McLuhan

The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures. — Marshall McLuhan

In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worst. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialect of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation. — Marshall McLuhan

...the logic of the photograph is neither verbal nor syntactical, a condition which renders literary culture quite helpless to cope with the photograph. — Marshall McLuhan

All media are extensions of some human faculty- psychic or physical. — Marshall McLuhan

All media work us over completely. — Marshall McLuhan

The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions. — Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan Quotes About World

The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village. — Marshall McLuhan

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance. — Marshall McLuhan

"Work" does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work. — Marshall McLuhan

The greatest propaganda in the world is our mother tongue, that is what we learn as children, and which we learn unconsciously. That shapes our perceptions for life. That is propaganda at its most extreme form. — Marshall McLuhan

An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him. — Marshall McLuhan

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes. — Marshall McLuhan

The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by the electric media--movies, Telstar, flight--far surpassesany possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage. — Marshall McLuhan

Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener. — Marshall McLuhan

Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up. Growing up--thatis our new work, and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice. — Marshall McLuhan

Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression. — Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan Quotes About Century

Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century. — Marshall McLuhan

Today's child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns subjects, and schedules. — Marshall McLuhan

If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch. — Marshall McLuhan

Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century. — Marshall McLuhan

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century. — Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan Quotes About Social

The medium, or process, of our time - electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action. — Marshall McLuhan

A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion. — Marshall McLuhan

North Americans have a peculiar bias. They go outside to be alone and they go home to be social. — Marshall McLuhan

Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. — Marshall McLuhan

Interface, of the resonant interval as 'where the action is', whether chemical, psychic or social, involves touch. — Marshall McLuhan

The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer. — Marshall McLuhan

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. — Marshall McLuhan

The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics. — Marshall McLuhan

It is always the psychic and social grounds, brought into play by each medium or technology, that readjust the balance of the hemispheres and of human sensibilities into equilibrium with those grounds. — Marshall McLuhan

If people were able to be convinced that art is precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artists? — Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan Quotes About Advertising

Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness. — Marshall McLuhan

Ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure. — Marshall McLuhan

Any expensive ad represents the toil, attention, testing, wit, art, and skill of many people. Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials. — Marshall McLuhan

Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brainwashing. — Marshall McLuhan

The modern little red riding hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objections to being eaten by the wolf. — Marshall McLuhan

The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds. — Marshall McLuhan

All advertising advertises advertising. — Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan Famous Quotes And Sayings

There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew. — Marshall McLuhan

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy. — Marshall McLuhan

Like primitive, we now live in a global village of our own making, a simultaneous happening. It doesn't necessarily mean harmony and peace and quiet but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else's affairs. — Marshall McLuhan

In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. — Marshall McLuhan

The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future. — Marshall McLuhan

the only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions — Marshall McLuhan

Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but, disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort. — Marshall McLuhan

One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with. — Marshall McLuhan

Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities. — Marshall McLuhan

What we call art would seem to be specialist artifacts for enhancing human perception. — Marshall McLuhan

Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to loose. — Marshall McLuhan

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition. — Marshall McLuhan

Art is anything you can get away with. — Marshall McLuhan

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. — Marshall McLuhan

The mother tongue is propaganda. — Marshall McLuhan

Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher. — Marshall McLuhan

Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials. — Marshall McLuhan

Television is teaching all the time. Does more educating than the schools and all the institutions of higher learning. — Marshall McLuhan

The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community. — Marshall McLuhan

The new is always made up of the old, or rather, what people see in the new is always the old thing. The rear-view mirror. The future of the future is the present, and this is something that people are terrified of. — Marshall McLuhan

Affluence creates poverty. — Marshall McLuhan

The electric age ... established a global network that has much the character of our central nervous system. — Marshall McLuhan

If it works, it's obsolete. — Marshall McLuhan

Time’ has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village... a simultaneous happening — Marshall McLuhan

Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction. — Marshall McLuhan

The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man. — Marshall McLuhan

The village had institutionalized all human functions in forms of low intensity.... Participation was high and organization was low. This is the formula for stability. — Marshall McLuhan

Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man. — Marshall McLuhan

When people become too intense, too serious, they will have trouble in relating to any sort of social game or norm. Perhaps this is why jokes are so important. On one hand they tell us about where the problems and grievances are, and, at the same time, they provide the means of enduring these grievances by laughing at the problems. — Marshall McLuhan

All discoveries in art and science result from an accumulation of errors. — Marshall McLuhan

Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been ... destroyed by sudden environmental change. — Marshall McLuhan

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity. — Marshall McLuhan

First we shape our tools, thereafter they shape us — Marshall McLuhan

Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity. — Marshall McLuhan

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference. — Marshall McLuhan

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age. — Marshall McLuhan

Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval. — Marshall McLuhan

I do not explain, I explore. — Marshall McLuhan

A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters. — Marshall McLuhan

The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication...is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts. — Marshall McLuhan

Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts. — Marshall McLuhan

The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns. — Marshall McLuhan

Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today. — Marshall McLuhan

In Tetrad form, the artifact is seen to be not neutral or passive, bur an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground. — Marshall McLuhan

Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity. — Marshall McLuhan

Poetry and the arts can’t exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind. — Marshall McLuhan

Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes. — Marshall McLuhan

If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves. — Marshall McLuhan

In experimental art, men are given the exact specifications of coming violence to their own psyches from their own counter-irritant or technology... But the counter-irritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug habit. — Marshall McLuhan

Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode - a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground. — Marshall McLuhan

The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy. — Marshall McLuhan

By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds. — Marshall McLuhan

The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati. — Marshall McLuhan

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy. — Marshall McLuhan

People don't actually read newspapers - they get into them every morning like a hot bath. — Marshall McLuhan

Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons. — Marshall McLuhan

Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance. — Marshall McLuhan

There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening. — Marshall McLuhan

Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language. — Marshall McLuhan

As the age of information demands the simultaneous use of all our faculties, we discover that we are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved. — Marshall McLuhan

Life Lessons by Marshall McLuhan

1. Marshall McLuhan taught us that media and technology have a profound impact on our lives and how we interact with one another.
2. He also believed that understanding the effects of media and technology is essential to understanding our society and culture.
3. He encouraged us to be mindful of the way we use and interact with media, and to be aware of the implications of our choices.