21 Marshall McLuhan Quotes on Media

Marshall McLuhan quotes on media

2. The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

3. The medium is the message.

7. Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society.

10. It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education & entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking onto the matter.

14. Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a manmade environment that ends 'Nature' and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed. Shakespeare at the Globe mentioning 'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players' (As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7) has been justified by recent events in ways that would have struck him as entirely paradoxical. The results of living inside a proscenium arch of satellites is that the young now accept the public spaces of the earth as role-playing areas. Sensing this, they adopt costumes and roles and are ready to 'do their thing' everywhere.' (p.9-10)

16. Jacques Ellul observes in Propaganda: When dialogue begins, propaganda ends. His theme, that propaganda is not this or that ideology but rather the action and coexistence of all media at once, explains why propaganda is environmental and invisible. The total life of any culture tends to be 'propaganda', for this reason. It blankets perception and supresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom. (p.77)

17. Another theme of the Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliche to archetype is 'pastimes are past times'. The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the twentieth century the number of past times that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of doubleness and interplay since this kind of hendiadys-dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy. (p.99)

20. Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature. (p.11)

24. 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)

29. The automated presidential surrogate is the superlative nobody. (p.157)

35. Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

36. Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.

42. People don't actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.

43. All advertising advertises advertising.

47. First Man made the hammer, then the hammer made the Man.

48. Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either

50. The perfection of the means of communication has given [the] average power complex of the human being an enormous extension of expression. (1953)

55. 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)

61. Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. (1967)

67. Electrically speaking, there's nothing but nuzzling and cuddling and cooing, alternating with wild yells for love and food and help. It's always May Day in the global nursery. (1974)

68. At the moment of Sputnik, the planet became a global theater in which there are no spectators but only actors. (1974)