Quotes from the film

This is the Quotes From The Film category.

Quotes from the film “This is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Massage”, an experimental documentary produced by Ernest Pintoff and Guy Fraumeni, narrated by actor Edward Binnes and broadcasted on NBC TV (19 March 1967). For more information see mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com.

“I come from a 19th century country, Canada, and this gives me a great advantage in looking at the 20th century.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The 20th century is the age of electric technology. It’s the most dominent tool in our time. It is causing you to reconsider and reevaluate every thought and every institution you formerly took for granted.”

— narrator

“I know exactly where the bounderies of the 20th century begin. Mostly they begin in the United States. So any Canadian can see what you cannot see. That is, you live in the 20th century more or less, and it becomes therefore invisible.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The electric age is changing you. It is changing your family. It is changing your neighborhood. It’s changing your education. It’s changing your job.”

— narrator

“When this circuit learns your job, what are you going to do?”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[The electric age] is changing your government. It’s changing your relationship to others. These little circuits are making our world go. The electric age is having a profound effect on us.”

— narrator

“We are in a period of fantastic change, that’s coming about at fantastic speed. Your life is changing dramatacilly. And you are numb to it.”

— narrator

“Well, obviously his ideas are complex. I mean he’s like, he’s a little…, he said he’s an intellectual. A special kind of it. And his ideas are in the row of intellect—they’re complex ideas. But our society is a complex society. There are many people who want things, you know, simplified. Of course, if intellects spoke in simple words then people like me would be out of work.”

— conversation

“Well, the title The Medium is the Massage is a teaser—a way of getting attention.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“There’s a wonderful sign hanging on a Toronto junkyard which reads: “Help beautify junkyards—throw something lovely away today.” And this is a very effective way of getting people to notice a lot of things.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“And, so the title is intended to draw attention to the fact that a medium is not something neutral. It does something to people. It takes hold of them, it rubs them up, it massages them, it bumps them around. And eh—as it were chiropractically. And the general roughing up that any society gets from a medium—especially a new medium—is what is intended to be indicated in that title.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The medium of our time—electric technology, everyting from the lightbulb, to the telephone, to the computer, to jets, to nucluar energy—is changing everything.”

— narrator

“We are in the middle of a tremendous clash between the old and the new.”

— narrator

“The medium does things to people. And they’re always completely unaware of this. They don’t really notice the new medium that is roughing them up. They think of the old medium because the old medium is always the content of the new medium. As movies are tend to be the content of TV, and as books used to be the content—novels used to be the content—of movies.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“And so, every time a new medium arrives, the old medium is the content—and it highly observable, highly noticeable—but the real, real roughing up and massaging is done by the new medium, and it is ignored.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The idea that television, computers and the rest are just tools that we use for better or worse isn’t true. The way you react to them is what’s important. Not what’s in them or on them.”

— narrator

“How you use your eyes to see, your ears to hear, brings about new forms of human association and action.”

— narrator

“The way we refer to this new situation created by the new television massage, or treatment of our senses, [it] is an evaluation made by the old visual types—looking in the rear-view mirror, as usual— of something that is threatening the old values and reversing the old values.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“When information is brushed against information… {the results are startling and effective.}”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We are reentering the old tribal world. But this time we’re going to go through the tribal dance on the tribal dream wide awake.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The perennial quest [—search—] for involvement, fill-in, takes many forms.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“It’s like drawing cartoons: you can’t fill in all the light and shade—all the items—and it also leaves the audience a very large role in developing its own insights.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Perhaps this comes as a bit of a surprise to many people—that they can also be a means of creating new awareness, new discoveries, new insights. And perhaps they’re a little bit reluctant to plunge.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Why should such a thing as go-go girls—or topless, or anything—why should it suddenly come into play in our situation at this particular time. What is the meaning of this? Because none of these things happen without some sort of cause or some sort of reason in the minds of other people.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The discotheque—the go-go, as a form—is an area in which anybody who takes time can make interesting discoveries.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Many of the things I talk about, I find very irritating. And that’s what leads me to investigate, you know—you look around for a hair of the dog that bit you.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I look into many of the new forms simply because I find them very exasperating and irritating and troublesome to peace of mind, and so on.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[And on the other hand] I’ve discovered to my amazement that if you take some violent and irritating process—say, like radio or TV—and start looking at how it works, what it’s doing to you, and why it’s doing it to you, you can get very enthralled and very excited.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Television has been labeled sterile.”

— narrator

“There is nothing sterile about television, except in the eye of the beholder. The eh, you know, the eh FCC type of observation of television is totally irrelevant, totally incapable of coming to grips of this form. When you speak of sterility, you speak of the movie programs that are shown on TV. You’re not talking about television at all.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Marshall McLuhan is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and director of its Centre for Culture and Technology. He’s the author of several books and hundreds of articles whose sales increase daily and spread his concepts to millions. Suddenly everybody, press, industry, corporations, and the new youth have discovered him. And he has become a storm center of extreme controversy.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“My largest objections to his principle is that he’s basically—and this is a distilled view of what I’ve gotten from his work and from his presence—a whimsical sociologist rather than a penetrating philosopher, or a deep thinking psychologist.”

— Ivan Karp

“The ordinary child of our culture is being educated—massaged—by the TV form into a state of participation in all sorts of sensuous operations that the old visual culture carefully refrain from and kept distant from.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The week after the book came out you suddenly heard professors starting talking about the grievances and the medium is the message. And suddenly all these little slogans, you know, all just being picked up, you know—like that, and if became sort of rather, sort of mod.”

— Malcolm Morley

“Why should in the TV age scuba diving or skin diving suddenly become popular? I would say right offhand the reason is very simple: TV watching is scuba diving.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I do believe he is a popularizer. I do believe in five years we will look back at this book and perhaps shrug our shoulders. I don’t think it’s a long or lasting influence.”

— Inez Garson

“The movie has become progressively better understood since TV. It has become an art form. It is being given all sorts of special consideration [and is even being used as a recruiting center for political talent and other show business.]”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 3

“I think he—sir McLuhan—seems to be awake to all of the media of modern life, certainly. And he understands perhaps either intuitively, or with his very broad intelligence, the meanings of the various major art movements, including pop art.”

— Ivan Karp

“Now that we have an electric—electronic—sort of world, we live imaginatively in the old frontier world of [—eh, well—] horse opera.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Salinger was the great, great hero, and strangely enough for another group A. A. Milne. So it doesn’t have to do with adulthood or maturity necessarily. I believe some of these are fad. However McLuhan, aside from youngsters who are now involved with Lord of the Rings in the same way, has some interesting things to say. The fact that Madison Avenue got more involved with him than perhaps academia—I’m talking about a faculty level at academia—I believe is revealing.”

— Inez Garson

“The fact is, the telephone speeds up all patterns of human interrelationship so that all kinds of decision making, all kinds of organizational life—inside business and in the community—all change completely.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“His writing style is extraordinarily up to date. It has a kind of swing to it that mediates between highfalutin scholarship and ad writing. And when you read that, although it doesn’t read clearly all the way, somehow the cumulative effect of it is that you understand much better than if you’re at some stuffy scholar talking in classroom.”

— Allan Kaprow

“For me this is his role and he’s talking about goggles, you know. And everybody’s got a set of goggles. Everybody thinks his own set was given to him by God, and is universal, natural and is supposed to be. And what he’s saying: this isn’t. Just for a minute—think of the possibility that maybe your set of goggles is a private idiosyncratic set of goggles. And suppose that the generation before had a different set of goggles and you got this set of goggles and you both think you’re looking at the same way—and you’re not.”

— conversation

“Know the praise is not completely unanimous. Though Life has labeled him “the Oracle of the Electric Age” and The Herald Tribune’s said he may be the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud and Einstein. He has also been called “The High Priest of Pop Culture”, “The ‘In’ Intellectual Celebrity”, and even “That Nut Professor in Canada” have been cited.”

— narrator

“He really has a great knack for developing slogans like “the medium is the message” and “the channel and information”, those sorts of slogans. And they’re very appealing. I really have nothing against Marshall McLuhan except that he got everything from Norbert Wiener who was a mathematician.”

— Malcolm Morley

“The medium I employ is that of the probe not the package. That is, I tend to use phrases, I tend to use observations that tease people, that squeeze them, that push at them, that disturb them. Because I’m really exploring situations. I’m not trying to deliver some complete set of observations about anything.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I don’t think he makes a decision. I don’t think he commits himself. Which, depending on your view of where our art is going, would either make him a potentially great artist or not one at all.”

“I’m an investigator, I explore, and I rather—instead of explaining, I explore.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasing old categories—[for looking ahead,] for probing around”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Ordinary people prefer to live in the immediate past, Bonanza style. That is, modern suburbanite livers in USA [the world of our time] live not in our modern suburbia—they live in Bonanza-land, one stage back. The Cartwright territory is a much more comfortable territory to live in than modern suburbia. And that is, emotionally it is much more gratifying and secure to live in Bonanza-land. And it is the old environment. Every time a new environment forms—or the new medium—people go back and live in the old one.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“When the Cartwrights were actually running USA—say back in 1850,1870—people weren’t living on the frontier at all. They didn’t live in Bonanza-land when Bonanza-land actually existed. They were living back in Jeffersonian democracy.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Are you living in today’s world?”

— narrator

“In the new electric world where everybody is involved in everybody—where everybody is involved in complex processes that are going on in the total environment—the old identity cards that used to constitute private identity—the old means of finding out who am I—will not work.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“People now have to encounter themselves in the inner world—Kierkegaard- or existential style—in order to know who they are. The old methods of merely external identity by marks of occupation, national origin, age grouping, and so on, these will not serve any longer as means of distinguishing private identity.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“you”

“How much do you make? Have you ever contemplated suicide?”

— narrator

“You are fast losing your private identity. Information is being collected about you, and it’s being recorded in the corporate memory, making up one big computerized gossip column, that is unforgiving, unforgettable. And so it goes, every minute of every day. You are the mass man, the collective store of all that ever happened.”

— narrator

“The walls of your rooms are coming down. It is becoming a simple matter to wire and pick out of your homes your private—once only personal—life and record it. Bugging is the new means for gathering information. Who knows, maybe you’ve been bugged for sound. It couldn’t happen.”

— narrator

“What’s that buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz[ing]?”

— narrator

“Privacy was almost unknown even in Shakespeare’s day. It came in after that period, in the seventeenth, eighteenth centuries, and it was dependent upon an architecture that sealed off spaces. People didn’t live in private spaces in earlier periods and it was of the coming of the book and the need for areas—private areas, in which to be eaten, study, and so on—that privacy gradually caught on as a value.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I don’t think privacy has quite the same meaning in our time that it used to have. I know for example of a big business in Toronto where all the private offices have been dissolved, all the walls have been pulled out, so that the participants in this business can sit together round tables in the middle of the big office space so that they could watch each other’s responses to stocks and world events, and so on. They want a perpetual dialogue going on among themselves as a response to world events.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The family circle has widened mom and dad. The worldpool of information, constantly pouring in on your closely knit family, is influencing them a lot more than you think. The instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all of us, all at once.”

— narrator

“Ours is a brand-new world of all-at-onceness.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“”Time” [in a sense] has ceased, “space” has vanished. [Like primitives,] we now live in a global village [of our own making]—a simultaneous happening.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The global village is not created by the motorcar or even by the airplane It is created by instant electronic information movement.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The global village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as a little town where everybody is maliciously engaged in poking his nose at everybody else’s business.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The global village is a world in which you don’t necessarily have harmony; you have extreme concern with everybody else’s business. And much involvement in everybody else’s life. It’s a sort of Ann Landers column written larger. And it doesn’t necessarily mean harmony and peace and quiet, but it does mean huge involvement in everybody’s else’s affairs.”

— Marshall McLuhan

And so, the global village is as big as a planet and as small as the village post office.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We now share too much about each other to be strangers to each other.”

— narrator

“We now share too much about each other to be strangers to each other.”

— narrator

“[For example,] in the age of the information explosion, all the walls go out between age-groups, ethnic groups, between family groups, national groups, between economies. The walls all go out. People suddenly have to adjust themselves to this new proximity, this new interrelationship, and merely to tell them that this has happened isn’t very helpful. What they need to know is, if it is happening, what does it mean to me? For example in the matter of, say automation and jobs.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Information at electric speed blows out all the partitions between jobs, involves people in firms, in operations that are total and inclusive, so that… Big business has discovered that instead of a person occupying a little specialist slot in the business he it’s better to be worked with small teams that can take overall cognizance and consideration of the whole operation of the firm, and come up with all sorts of new solutions for factors that affect the entire operation firm, instead of just going ahead doing their little job in the old pattern. Same way with private lives; what had formerly been private life tends to become more and more corporate.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Today the information level of education in the classroom is far below the level of modern home environment of electronic information.”

— narrator

“The reason that the 19th century child could take the curriculum and the school room of his time with some seriousness was that he knew there was a considerable relation between what was going on in the schoolroom and what was going on outside. That is no longer true we still go on 19th century style with classified subjects, instruction by stenciling on brain pans and regurgitating an exam form. This is all 19th century factory system school work but it’s no longer supported by the outside environment.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The electronic environment makes an information level outside the school room that is far higher than the information level inside the school room.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“In the 19th century the knowledge inside the school room was higher than the knowledge outside. Today it is reversed; the child knows that in going to school he is in a sense interrupting his education.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Education must shift from instruction, from the imposing of stencils on brain pens, as it were, to discovery—to probing and exploration [and to the recognition of the language of forms].”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The young today reject goals. They want roles [—R-O-L-E-S. That is, total involvement. They do not want fragmented, specialized goals or jobs].”

— Marshall McLuhan

“How can our youth look forward to a specialized job when the computer world of automation may eliminate that job?”

— narrator

“The reason that our educational system is in crisis, is because we don’t outstop this flow of data, this one-way flow of data, onto the brain pans of the unfortunate and helpless students.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“All media [—or technologies—] work us over completely. They are so pervasive [—permeating throughout—] 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].”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Any new medium changes the image we have of our own bodies. For example, the motorcar is a vast extension of our feet and eh, it’s a, it turns you into a paraplegic with a, in a powered arm chair as it were. But the change is completely the image we have of our bodies.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“With television the image we have of our bodies is profoundly altered by the fact that the image goes inside us, and this has had a profound effect on the motorcar. The safety car is partly the response—that or the effect—of television on the motorcar. Involvement in the motorcar in a new way makes people feel that it’s something they ought to be able to control and in which—from which—they might expect a certain degree of safety. This is very much a TV effect on motorcar—it may destroy the motorcar.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[But] the image we have of our own bodies is all completely altered by [a] new medium.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Color television is not the old black-and-white television with color added; it is a new medium, it completely alters the image we have of ourselves—our body precepts, as the psychologists say.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 11

“Our body percept is something of which we are always unconscious.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Your body percept changes directly with any alteration in temperature, any alteration in sound, any alteration in input. So any of the senses affects your body image. Of this you are completely unaware. Only a psychiatrist can really make you aware of the image you have of your own body.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 6

End of part 1

“All
media
are
extensions
of
some
human
faculty—
psychic [/mental]
or
physical.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The wheel …is an extension of the foot.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 46

“{The book} is an extension of the eye…”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 368

“Clothing, [is] an extension of the skin…”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 129

“Electric circuitry, [the medium of our time, is] an extension of the central nervous system.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 3

“[Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions.] The extension of any one sense [displaces the other senses and] alters the way we think and act—the way we perceive the world. [The way we perceive our own bodies.]”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 69

“When
these
ratios
change,
men change.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 9 and “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 98

“Before the alphabet, our primary sensory organ was the ear.”

— narrator

“The great power of the phonetic alphabet, as discovered in antiquity, consisted in creating a means of translating all languages and all human activities into a common set of symbols, which were quite neutral and non-involving.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Literate culture as discovered by the Greeks, and as practiced by the Romans, created civilization in the sense that it created a high order of civilized culture from which people could detach themselves.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“That is, literate culture is visual and detached; it creates the civilized man, the detribalized man—the man who is not involved.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[And] the effect of the electric revolution is to create once more an involvement that is total.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We are unaware of the dangers of not understanding the need for involvement.”

— narrator

“The dangers are total. The chances of your understanding anything going on in your own time are very small. Except through the means or media you’re provided by artists.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Artists are people who enjoy living in the present.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Since the time of the Renaissance we have been contained by a visual monopoly. Art was rigid and kept us out of the frame.”

— narrator

“[Today] Art
is anything
you can
get away
with.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“My own means—way of testing the sorts of effects that any new form is likely to have on us—is to keep a sharp lookout on changing styles in the arts.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The artist is always a jump ahead of technology, and is engaged really in giving you images of what sort of effects it’s likely to have upon you—later on. So that the changing style in the arts—like pop art, and so on—are pretty good indications of the real meaning of television.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Pop art simply tells you: the only art form left for you today is your own natural environment. You have now to program it as if it were an art—a work of art—and an environment.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 6

“So, to suddenly be confronted with the need to use the human environment itself as art form, is one way of drawing attention to the fact that the new environments created by new media require a certain amount of human programming and control for our psychic life.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Why should art and culture suddenly become very big business, like big science? The reasons are tied up of the fact that in—that we’re living in an Information Age.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“When you live in an Information Age culture becomes big business, education becomes big business, and the cultural explosion, or the information explosion, becomes itself culture. It knocks down all the walls between culture and business—as between education and business.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“There’s no longer any gap between the campus and the Wall Street, or very big business. If anybody can participate in this whole area of exploration and discovery. And so I try to tease people, and to urge them to get into these activities of discovery. Children love it. You can quickly get them going, because one reason being: they sense that here is an area that in which I can become far more expert than my teacher.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“What about pop art? Why pop? Why not mom? Art used to be mom’s province. Suddenly: pop art. It’s a pun.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“One of the strange features of our time is the joke without the story line. Simply the gag. Like the surge—the expensive surge and who, when his patients couldn’t afford surgery, would offer to touch up the x-ray for free.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[Or the Polish jokes, like, eh:] “Alexander Graham Kowalski—the first ‘telephone Pole.’”. [The first Polish joke I ever heard. One of the best.”]

— Marshall McLuhan, “Address at Vision 65” , p. 1

“It’s a—it’s possible, or the—“What is purple and hums?” Of course, the answer is: “An electric grape.” Or: “[…] why does it hum?” “It doesn’t know the words.” And these jokes have no story line, they’re just conundrums. And the kids eat them up. They don’t.., they think the old story line jokes are for—strictly square.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 1

“In the electric age you don’t have a continuity in the old sense. You don’t have a strung-out continuum. You…, everything happens at once. Everything goes over everything else, and so everything is affecting everything else. There are many examples of this—and it helps to bring to mind that every joke really reveals a grievance.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Eh, humor comes out of a world of unhappy bitter grievances. Hence, the… many of the jokes in our society, most jokes our society—the good ones—come from ethnic groups, various minorities who have some sort of gripe.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Clothing as a means of communication? Don’t you think they’re trying to tell you something?”

— narrator

“The whole world of teenage dress is a world of icon in one hand in the sense that they stress all sorts of images with strongly marked bounding lines. But these images, the costumes that they prefer, the ones that highlight role-playing. rather than individual identity—they would rather be involved.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Well for example: a judge with a wig. It doesn’t represent any private entity whatever—he is a role, a function in the whole society. The surgeon in his white coat, the scientist in the white coat—this is role playing. And this appeals deeply to the young and the teenager type. The wearing the long hair, the beards, and so on, this suggests involvement in depth——in role. And it’s not a private identity so much, as a corporate one.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The new teenage craving—an unconscious, they are not quite unaware why—is to drive toward corporate involvement in role-playing. Role-playing has been a game going on in management centers, and so on, for years—as a way of discovering: who am I in this organization.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Popular, hit parade music is still very close to speech patterns. One of the things about the Beatle music, for example, that is so effective, is that they were the first—as far as I know—to put English popular speech—popular lower-class British cockney rhythms and Liverpool rhythms—into musical form. The English have never had a music directly related to popular speech before.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“When you make a music that is related to popular speech it enables the singer to put on the whole audience, the public, as a mask and wear it as a mask of power. The Beatles are powerful—any popular music is powerful—because it puts on the rhythms and the patterns of the whole audience as a mask.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[John Cage, a composer of new music, has stated:] “Everything we do is music.””

— John Cage, quoted by Calvin Tomkins in “The Bride and the Bachelors”

“Everyone has the best seat.”

— John Cage, “Silence: Lectures and Writings”

“Theatre takes place all the time, wherever one is. And art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case.”

— John Cage, “Silence: Lectures and Writings”

“[O]ne must be disinterested […], accept that a sound is a sound and a man is a man, give up illusions about ideas of order, expressions of sentiment, and all the rest of our inherited aesthetic claptrap.”

— John Cage, “Silence: Lectures and Writings”

“[Where a visual space is an organized continuum of a uniformed connected kind,] the ear world [like the electric age] is a world of simultaneous relationships.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Television is directing our energies inward. Our children today are growing up as a kind of yogi zen Buddhist bunch of inward directed people looking seriously into themselves. Not just idly selecting some exterior goal but seeking for some completely meaningful identification with some great process. That’s why youth Peace Corps, and so on, appeals to children. It’s not a job, it’s a completely involving role.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“And so, the television, I would say, has had this extraordinary effect of driving Western man inward. Western man has triumphed over nature because he’s been oriented outward—at the visible world. And now with television he is being oriented inward to the invisible world.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[And] LSD is merely one little side issue in TV effects.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Television establishes the dynamics of our new age. With its always scanning finger it reintegrates the human senses. Thereby making books obsolete. Books are now art objects.”

— narrator

“Television demands participation and involvement in depth of the whole being.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“It was the funeral of President Kennedy that most strongly proved the power of television [—to draw everyone into mass participation—] to invest an occasion with the character of corporate participation. It involves an entire population in a ritual process. [The entire nation and world were simultaneously united in a single emotion and involvement.]”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 368

“Kennedy came into office as the first TV president with a resulting involvement on the part of all age groups in his whole presidency. That was quite unexpected and so that his assassination created a similar, corresponding violence of response that was quite unexpected on all age groups, and in many other parts of the world besides our own.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 366-368

“The satellite system of broadcasting permits, for example, an immediate participation in events anywhere in the world, ending all news reports.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“What we call a news report is a verbalized substitute for participation in that event.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“With satellite broadcasting you just go to the place and participate directly in the sufferings or the events of that area—floods or whatnot. Whether this will tend to create a new kind of news, I don’t know.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“For example, at the present time, what we automatically think of as news it’s just bad news. If it isn’t bad news it isn’t news. If it’s good news, it’s likely to be PR or advertising. And it takes an awful lot of bad news to sell all that good news that we have to carry in our newspapers and magazines.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“What type of presidential candidates will best lend themselves to television?”

— narrator

“Oh, they have to be flexible, casual, Will Roger-ish, Jack Paar-ish. They have to have a kind of informality and casualness that is suited to the medium. But the more ramrodish, rigid types will just not go down with the TV viewing public at all. It’s sort of turning TV over to the casting bureaus, and politics having become show businesses increasingly in the hands of the casting agencies.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The railway radically altered the personal outlooks and patterns of social interdependence. It bred and nurtured the American Dream.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[The railway] gave us darkest suburbia and its lasting symbol: the lawnmower.”

— narrator

“The circuited city of the future will not be the huge hunk of concentrated real estate created by the railway. It will take on a totally new meaning under conditions of very rapid [transit and communication—] movement.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 13

“Well, the city, as a, created partly by the railway—as a railhead—the city has undergone strange transformations with the motorcar at one hand and the airplane on the other hand. The tendency of the motorcar is to extend the city as a ribbon development right across vast territories, so that between here and Boston is like one city, between here and Washington is a city. And, on the other hand, the airplane sort of leapfrogs over those phases and wipes out roads, wipes out the big city.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We’ll work at home in created space, created by electric media, connected to the corporation or boss, not by railroads or roads, but by television and other media. We’ll relay information by closed circuit to a TV and by computer systems. The great mass of American rush hour will be over—and the hell with driving.”

— narrator

“When many of these kinds of developments begin to occur in many forms at once, at very high speeds, then it becomes easy to perceive the pattern. When things happen relatively slowly it’s like still shots on a film. If you look at the one at a time it’s very slow. You don’t see very much change. But project them at a reasonable speed and the pattern of development becomes perfectly evident.

— Marshall McLuhan

“We are now living in a world where things change so rapidly that anybody can spot the configuration—the pattern of change. And we’re living increasingly in a world of pattern recognition instead of this classified and isolated items. The whole speed up has tended to make everything much more intelligible and understandable than in the past.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The speed of electric communication alone does not allow us to use purely visual material to comprehend the world. They’re just too slow to be relevant or effective. We are moving from the habit of data classification. For they refer only to the past, not the present.”

— narrator

“Advertising agencies have always been mystified as to: why is the storyboard more effective than the final product? And the answer to that is very important. It is that the incomplete form allows the audience more participation than the completed form.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“How many times do you suppose you’ve heard words to that effect, announcing a commercial. Often probably, since they’re sandwiched between the hours of TV viewing time. The quality and entertainment level of the commercial is getting very high. Fierce competition keeps the advertising agencies constantly reevaluating and recreating their images.”

— narrator

“To get a hold of the viewer’s attention, the advertisers reach for new ideas. More and more because of repeated showings. The new approaches become familiar and accepted.”

— narrator

“This is a sound of heart. It will beat 72 times in this minute.”

— announcer

“The commercial has preconditioned mass viewing audiences to abrupt zooms, with no story lines. Many of the techniques utilized in modern theatrical films.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The Fellini’s and Bergmans, and such, pull the story line off the film. And the result is that you become much more profoundly involved in the film process.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 9

“[Yeah,] when you put a story line on a novel or a film you’re much less involved.”

“All right, the detective story—Edgar Allan Poe discovered, you see, that if you take the story line off the detective story, the audience has to participate and make the story as it goes.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 9

“And so paradoxically, pull the story line off any situation and you get a much higher level of creative participation on the part of a reader or the audience.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[And] the Fellini 8½ is a world where the audience is to work very hard. Same as abstract art, same as Picasso.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Picasso has a picture of “man sitting in chair”—there’s no man, there’s no chair. What Picasso was painting was what it feels like for a man to be sitting in a chair. The audience has to work this out and participate in the experience of sitting in a chair instead of just visually identifying chair and men.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Movies are better than ever!”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[But] most movies are still hotter than ever. Hollywood often causes revolutions, as Sukarno has said.”

— narrator

“The motion picture industry has provided a window on the world, and the colonized nations have looked through that window and have seen the things of which they have been deprived. It is perhaps not generally realized that a refrigerator can be a revolutionary symbol—to a people who have no refrigerators. A motorcar owned by a worker in one country can be a symbol of revolt to a people deprived of even the necessities of life… [Hollywood] helped to build up the sense of deprivation of man’s birthright, and that sense of deprivation has played a large part in the national revolutions of postwar Asia.”

— Sukarno, quoted by Marshall McLuhan from an article in “Variety”, titled: “Ice Boxes Sabotage Colonialism”

“The conflict going on in Vietnam has a corresponding conflict within ourselves. We have a hot war being reported on a cool medium and it creates a great deal of distaste and reluctance in the population at large, which is very difficult for most people to understand.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“So cool is involving, hot is not.”

“So cool is involving, hot is not.”— Marshall McLuhan

“Eh, my friend is fond of explaining that when he came to this part of New York, the cops told him: if you’re ever in trouble, never shout “Help”, shout “Fire”. And he said, if you shout “Fire” all the windows will go up, you shout “Help” you’ll get nothing. Help is to involving, it demands too much for most people—they’re afraid. Fire is not involving, it’s a hot medium. You can throw a blanket, throw a bucket, and not be personally involved at all. And so, it’s an extreme example of this strange conflict between hot and cool.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“But the movie medium is hot and loves violent events, just as the newspaper is hot and loves violent events. But the TV medium is so involving in the process of whatever is going on, that it is cool and when it handles war, and the sufferings of war, it creates an audience involvement which makes war most untakeable.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“So this, Vietnam is our first TV war. And people are finding it not too much to their liking. It may be necessary to ban it altogether from TV from now on.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Media reach out to the very furthermost corners of the world. Hopefully more and more cool media will be getting there soon to cool the temperatures raised by the hot media, like radio and film.”

— narrator

“Real, total war has become information war.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Whenever hot wars are necessary these days, we conduct them in the backyards of the world with [the weapons of] the old technologies.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“These [hot] wars are happenings, tragic games. [It is no longer convenient, or suitable, to use the latest technologies for fighting our wars, because] the latest technologies have rendered war meaningless [—for there can be no victory].”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The hydrogen bomb is history’s exclamation point. [It ends an age-long sentence of manifest violence!]”

— Marshall McLuhan/narrator

“These technologies we play with create an inevitable chain of consequences. These consequences are inevitable only to people who are not paying attention to what’s going on, or to what they’ve done. You know, you press a button and start something. It’s not inevitable that you must press the button. If you understand what’s going to happen when you press it, it isn’t inevitable that you must press it.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“These are difficult times, because we are witnessing a clash of cataclysmic proportions between of two great technologies [the print technology of yesterday and the electric technology of today].”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We approach the new with the psychological conditioning and sensory responses of the old.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Both [the print technology of yesterday and the electric technology of today] represent a common failure: the attempt to do a job demanded by the new environment with the tools of the old.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“People have always been unaware of new environments because they’re afraid of them.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“From the moment of birth people sense that the environment—the new environment around them—is hostile; it’s a real threat to their whole existence. And so, every time an environment changes, we hasten to seek security and comfort in the old environment.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Uhm, I was delighted to come across a passage in Shakespeare a few days ago—and a familiar passage—which suddenly revealed the same message: “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin, That each with one consent pursues new-born gawds, Though they be made and moulded of things past.””

— Marshall McLuhan

“The new is always made up of the old, or rather, what people see in the new is always the old thing—the rear-view mirror. And what people see at any time, what their attention is focused upon, is always the rear-view mirror—never the present image or the present fact.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The past went thataway.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Suburbia [the suburban world of our time] lives [imaginatively] in Bonanza-land.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[There are detracting voices who cry out:] “The stars are so big,
The Earth is so small,
Stay as you are.” [But can we afford to?]”

— second-grader, quoted in “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man” by Marshall McLuhan

“He was a presence. But you had to either acknowledge and use, or if you didn’t use him, you had to say why you didn’t use him. So, now not everybody has to read McLuhan, sure, but if writers, admen, television producers read him, and act upon some of his insights, that touches everybody. But the thing with McLuhan, and this is why there’s the current distraction, and everything like that, and it’s part of what he’s talking about—he’s a victim of his own theories, as well as the creator of them you know—is the fact that the time span which in Freud would have gone over 10, 15, 20, 40 years, is now happening to this guy in 18 months.”

— conversation