348 quotes
Every technology contrived and “outered” by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization. (p. 174)
The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)
The stock market was created by the telegraph and the telephone, and its panics are engineered by carefully orchestrated stories in the press. (p. 106)
Counterblast (1969)
The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature...The new media are not ways of relating us to the old world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.
If there is any sense in deploring the growth of corporate and collective art forms such as the film and the press, it is surely in relation to the previous individualist technologies that these new forms corrode.
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)
I am not a "culture critic" because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world.
Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987)
Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.
The medium is the message.
Understanding Media (1964)
The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it’s the universal experience of TV watchers.
Playboy Interview (1969)
The "tragic flaw" is not a detail of characterization, a mere "fly in the ointment", but a structural feature of ordinary consciousness. (p.45)
The comic strip: upholder of Homeric culture. (p.19)
Counterblast (1969)
The ways of thinking implanted by electronic culture are very different from those fostered by print culture. Since the Renaissance most methods and procedures have strongly tended towards stress on the visual organization of knowledge.
The Agenbite of Outwit (1998)
He is setting up a mosaic configuration or galaxy for insight … Innis makes no effort to "spell out" the interrelations between the components in his galaxy. He offers no consumer packages in his later work, but only do-it-yourself kits...
The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)
Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world. (p. 30)
The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)
At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology. (p. 300)
Understanding Media (1964)
The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature. (p. 14)
Counterblast (1969)
People never remember but the computer never forgets. (p. 69)
Counterblast (1969)
There is no connection between the elements in an electric world, which is equivalent to being surrounded by the human unconscious. (p. 260)
The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011)
King Lear is a working model of the process of denudation by which men translate themselves from a world of roles to a world of jobs. (p. 16)
The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)
The literate man is a sucker for propaganda...You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas.
[On Jimmy Carter] "Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he puts nostalgia in its place."