Marshall McLuhan Quotes

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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.

Marshall McLuhan

Each new technology is a reprogramming of sensory life.

Marshall McLuhan

Acoustic space is totally discontinuous, like touch. It is a sphere without centers or margins.

Marshall McLuhan

Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space... it is a cosmic, invisible architecture of the human dark.

Marshall McLuhan

The new science of communication is percept, not concept.

Marshall McLuhan

History as she is harped. Rite words in rote order.

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan

The copy [of an ad] is merely a punning gag to distract the critical faculties while the image of the [product] goes to work on the hypnotized viewer. Those who have spent their lives protesting about 'false and misleading ad copy' are godsends to advertisers, as teetotalers are to brewers, and moral censors are to books and films. The protesters are the best acclaimers and accelerators. Since the advent of pictures, the job of the ad copy is as incidental and latent as the 'meaning' of a poem is to a poem, or the words of a song are to a song.

Marshall McLuhan

There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.

Marshall McLuhan

Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses.

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan

Every process pushed far enough tends to reverse or flip suddenly. Chiasmus – the reversal to process caused by increasing its speed, scope or size.

Marshall McLuhan

The young are really the heirs to a generation of incompetence.

Marshall McLuhan

Man in the electronic age has no possible environment except the globe and no possible occupation except information-gathering.

Marshall McLuhan

Paradox is the technique for seizing the conflicting aspects of any problem. Paradox coalesces or telescopes various facets of a complex process in a single instant.

Marshall McLuhan

The typographic logic created the outsider, the alienated mass, as the type of integral, that is, intuitive and irrational, man.

Marshall McLuhan

The only cool PR is provided by one's enemies. They toil incessantly and for free.

Marshall McLuhan

Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.

Marshall McLuhan

Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status.

Marshall McLuhan

The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.

Marshall McLuhan

By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.

Marshall McLuhan

Our book technology has Gutenberg at one end and the Ford assembly lines at the other. Both are obsolete.

Marshall McLuhan

The Chinese used the intervals between things as the primary means of getting 'in touch' with situations.

Marshall McLuhan

Although meaningless in a tribal context, numbers and statistics assume mythic and magical qualities of infallibility in literate societies.

Marshall McLuhan

The Greek point of view in both art and chronology has little in common with ours but was much like that of the Middle Ages.

Marshall McLuhan

The computer is by all odds the most extraordinary of all the technological clothing ever devised by man, since it is the extension of our central nervous system. Beside it, the wheel is a mere hula-hoop.

Marshall McLuhan

The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.

Marshall McLuhan

We are numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture.

Marshall McLuhan

We live invested in an electric information environment that is quite as imperceptible to us as water is to fish.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan