Marshall McLuhan - Medium Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

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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
In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.

Marshall McLuhan
The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message.

Marshall McLuhan
The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie.

Marshall McLuhan
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
By simply moving information and brushing information against information, any medium whatever creates vast wealth.

Marshall McLuhan
Although the medium is the message, the controls go beyond programming. The restraints are always directed to the content, which is always another medium. The content of the press is literary statement, as the content of the book is speech, and the content of the movie is the novel. So the effects of radio are quite independent of its programming.

Marshall McLuhan
It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV.

Marshall McLuhan
A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.

Marshall McLuhan
Color is not so much a visual as a tactile medium.

Marshall McLuhan
The "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.

Marshall McLuhan
All media work us over completely. They are so persuasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical.

Marshall McLuhan
It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.

Marshall McLuhan
There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV.... Hot media are... low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.

Marshall McLuhan
Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener. That is the immediate aspect of radio. A private experience. The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber.

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
One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information system.

Marshall McLuhan
The hot radio medium used in cool or nonliterate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment.

Marshall McLuhan
The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.

Marshall McLuhan