30 Marshall McLuhan Quotes on Technology

Marshall McLuhan quotes on technology

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

5. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.

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.

8. When this circuit learns your job, what are you going to do?

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)

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)

18. Disarmament is illogical and futile, unless one is prepared to regard the available means of production and social organization as affording unique social ends. To divert electrical energy and circuitry into atomic bombs shows the same imaginative power as wiring the dining-room chairs to enable one to electrocute the sitter in the event that he might prove hostile. It is part of the age-old habit of using new means for old purposes instead of discovering what are the new goals contained in the new means. (p.202)

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)

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)

22. New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers. (p.47)

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)

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)

26. Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly. (p.109)

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

28. The new overkill is simply an extension of our nervous system into a total ecological service environment. Such a service environment can liquidate or terminate its beneficiaries as naturally as it sustains them. (p.152)

31. Technology is that which separates us from our environment.

34. We are the genitals of our technology. We exist only to improve next years model.

38. Spaceship earth is still operated by railway conductors, just as NASA is managed by men with Newtonian goals.

45. If it works, it's obsolete.

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

51. With the return to simultaneity we enter the tribal and acoustic world once more. Globally. (1956)

52. Man the tool-making animal, whether in speech or in writing or in radio, has long been engaged in extending one or another of his sense organs in such a manner as to disturb all of his other senses and faculties. (1962)

53. Any technology tends to create a new human environment... Technological environments are not merely passive containers of people but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike. (1962)

54. A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters. (1964)

56. In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin. (1964)

58. We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us (1964)

62. 'The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.' (1969)

65. What is very little understood about the electronic age is that it angelizes man, disembodies him. Turns him into software. (1971)

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)

70. As we transfer our whole being to the data bank, privacy will become a ghost or echo of its former self and what remains of community will disappear. (1980)