Marshall McLuhan - Understanding Media (1964)

72 Sourced Quotes

View all Marshall McLuhan Quotes
In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin.

Marshall McLuhan
Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes.

Marshall McLuhan
Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.

Marshall McLuhan
Any ad consciously attended to is comical. Ads are not meant for conscious consumption. They are intended as subliminal pills for the subconsious in order to exercise an hypnotic spell, especially on sociologists.

Marshall McLuhan
The mosaic form of the TV image demands participation and involvement in depth, of the whole being, as does the sense of touch.

Marshall McLuhan
We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation.

Marshall McLuhan
Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force.

Marshall McLuhan
In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses.

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
In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.

Marshall McLuhan
The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.

Marshall McLuhan