13 Marshall McLuhan Quotes on Society

Marshall McLuhan quotes on society

1. There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.

6. Art is anything you can get away with.

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

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)

21. By involving all men in all men, by the electric extension of their own nervous systems, the new technology turns the figure of the primitive society into a universal ground that buries all previous figures. (p.25)

23. Marx shared with economists then and since the inability to make his concepts include innovational processes. It is one thing to spot a new product but quite another to observe the invisible new environments generated by the action of the product on a variety of pre-existing social grounds. (p.63)

25. Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity. (p.92)

27. Although meaningless in a tribal context, numbers and statistics assume mythic and magical qualities of infallibility in literate societies. (p.114)

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)

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

69. Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence. (1976)