Marshall McLuhan - Technology Quotes

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When we invent a new technology, we become cannibals. We eat ourselves alive since these technologies are merely extensions of ourselves. The new environment shaped by electric technology is a cannibalistic one that eats people. To survive one must study the habits of cannibals.

Marshall McLuhan
In experimental art, men are given the exact specifications of coming violence to their own psyches from their own counter-irritant or technology... But the counter-irritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug habit.

Marshall McLuhan
Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes.

Marshall McLuhan
We now live in a technologically prepared environment that blankets the earth itself. The humanly contrived environment of electric information and power has begun to take precedence over the old environment of "nature." Nature, as it were, begins to be the content of our technology.

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

Marshall McLuhan
Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology.

Marshall McLuhan
Each new technology is a reprogramming of sensory life.

Marshall McLuhan
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
Every technology contrived and outered by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization.

Marshall McLuhan
Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology.

Marshall McLuhan
The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.

Marshall McLuhan
The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.

Marshall McLuhan
When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments.

Marshall McLuhan
Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of communal interdependence.

Marshall McLuhan
New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers.

Marshall McLuhan
Dantzig explains why the language of number had to be increased to meet the needs created by the new technology of letters.

Marshall McLuhan
The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world.

Marshall McLuhan
Every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience.

Marshall McLuhan
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
The potential of any new technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors.

Marshall McLuhan
Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.

Marshall McLuhan
Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind.

Marshall McLuhan
When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized.

Marshall McLuhan
At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology.

Marshall McLuhan
My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

Marshall McLuhan
The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.

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
The world of the Greeks illustrates why visual appearances cannot interest people before the interiorization of alphabetic technology.

Marshall McLuhan
Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of "what the public wants" played over its own nerves.

Marshall McLuhan