Quotes from the website

This is the Quotes From The Website category.

All quotes by Marshall McLuhan and others from “The Medium is the Massage” (the lecture, the book, the film, the magazine and/or the record, single and remix).

“We impose the form of the old on the content of the new. [The malady lingers on.]”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Where the possible was the improbable and the improbable the inevitable…”

— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”

“Today, the mass audience (the successor to the “public”) can be used as a creative, participating force. It is, instead, merely given packages of passive entertainment.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We shape our toes and thereafter our toes ape us.”

“{Everything is changing—you,} your family, your neighborhood, your education, your job, your government {, your relation to “the others”. And they’re changing dramatically.}”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We have had to shift our stress of attention from action to reaction. We must now know in advance the consequences of any policy or action, since the results are experienced without delay. Because of electric speed, we can no longer wait and see.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 387

“The line as a means of organising human life is disappearing. I don’t say this is a good or a bad thing. I don’t even pretend to know. But it disappears under the impact of an all at once technology.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— narrator

“There are some lessons to be learned from the artist in regard to our own time in this way. A man like Seurat, the painter, was painting TV in 1880, that is, he had a model, a perception that had all the technical features of TV—rear projection, minute fragmentation of image into these little pointillisms. The TV viewer receives these little spots on himself, they wrap around him, he becomes lord of the flies. They settle on him literally. The TV viewer is covered with these little dots, these little flies. But Seurat knew that, and he painted that back in 1880, but he wanted an effect. ”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

“Well, it’s a wedding and most of our media are like that. They tend to hybridize or crossover with other media and, you know, the book and the picture, and the movie and the soundtrack and the motorcar is itself a product of the union of the machine and of the electric or the sparking system.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The art of the speaker consists in compressing all of his aims into slogans.”

— Elias Canetti, “Crowds and Power”

“Survival is not possible if one approaches his environment, the social drama, with a fixed, unchangeable point of view—the witless repetitive response to the unperceived.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The new modes of instantaneous, long-distance human communication—radio, telephone, television—are linking the world’s people in a vast net of electric circuitry that creates a new depth and breadth of personal involvement in events and breaks down the old, traditional boundaries that made specialization possible.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The line, the [/that good old reliable] continuum

—this sentence is a prime example—

became the organizing principle of life.”

— 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

“”Come into my parlor,” said the computer to the specialist.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The Renaissance Legacy.
The Vanishing Point = Self-Effacement,
The Detached Observer.
No Involvement!”

— 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

“Why did the moron take a ladder to church?”

“Prior to print the narrative structure was rather obscure and opaque compared to what it became with printing. As a matter of fact you don’t even get fictional narrative until you hit upon the wonderful device of getting the characters all moving along a row. Eighteenth century novel.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“This sense of the space capsule as applied to the motorcar is now creating the motorcar as a padded cell. And what more appropriate form of design for the maniac driver? But the motorcar as a feedback design pattern turns into a padded cell.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Lights, camera, no action. Hollywood is host to Premier Khrushchev.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“All rights reserved. Copyright 1967. The I Shall Find It Publishing Company.”

“The young person today is a data processor on a very large scale.”

— Marshall McLuhan, “Address at Vision 65” , p. 4

“The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by electric media—movies, Telstar, flight—far surpasses any possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Joyce is, in the Wake, making his own Altamira cave drawings of the entire history of the human mind, in terms of its basic gestures and postures during all the phases of human culture and technology. As his title indicates, he saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but if again, then let’s make it a wake or awake or both. Joyce could see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle as in a trance or dream. He discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 7

“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

“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

“Reminders—(relics of the past)—in a world of the PRINTED word-efforts to introduce an AUDITORY dimension onto the visual organization of the PAGE: all effect information, RHYTHM, inflection, pauses. Until recent years, these EFFECTS were quite elaborate—they allowed for all sorts of CHANGES of type faces. The NEWSPAPER layout provides more variety of AUDITORY effects from typography than the ordinary book page does.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Such is also the harsh logic of industrial automation. The range of choice in design, stress, and goal… is very much greater than it ever could have been under mechanization… Panic about automation as threat of uniformity on a world scale is the projection into the future of mechanical standardization and specialism, which are now past.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“See Dick. See Dick protest. Protest, Dick! Protest!”

— Mort Gerberg, drawing

“You can read a great deal about the concept of cool in Mr. [T. S.] Eliot’s Four Quartets. It’s a somewhat Oriental concept.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“So there are some rather exciting things afoot.”

— 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

“Youth instinctively understands the present environment—the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth. This is the reason for the great alienation between generations.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Well now, time for a few questions?”

— Marshall McLuhan

“America was able to develop and apply swiftly all the consequences of printing. In the book, in the newspaper, and by extension of the assembly line in industry and organization and markets because there was no backlog of obsolete technology to be liquidated first. Europeans had to struggle through a long painful period in order to clear enough room to exploit the new print technology.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Who are you, are you good enough to eat?”

— Lewis Carroll, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”

“Now, I’m merely concerned, as a professor of literature, I’m concerned with what effect does this have on the future of literature, on the future of the work I have undertaken.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“{Electric circuitry is orientalizing the West.} The contained, the distinct, the separate—our Western legacy—are being replaced by the flowing, the unified, the fused.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Now this kind of involvement, the yogi like or contemplative like, involvement in depth in ourselves, this quest inwardly for huge significances. This is not exactly a western habit, you know of a cheerful endeavor and applied knowledge, and so on.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Quanto è bella la prospectiva.”

— Paolo Uccello

“Electric technology, both radio and TV, for example, have this power of involving us in all our senses.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

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

“You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy?”

— James Joyce, “Finnigans Wake”

“I do believe it. I really believe it.”

— discussion in the serie ‘Word Count’ on WBAI-FM with John Culkin and Quentin Fiore. Moderator: Samuel Blazer.

“We don’t know who discovered water, but we’re pretty sure it wasn’t the fish.”

— John Culkin, quoted by Howard Gossage in “Ramparts Magazine”, April 1966, p. 37

“Indeed, even our tests for sanity often assumed that the line is present in nature and, at most, must to be discovered or given visual existence.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The youth of today are not permitted to approach the traditional heritage of mankind through the door of technological awareness. This only possible door for them is slammed in their faces by a rear-view-mirror society.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“… chopping and cropping of words. The first time …”

“Studies show a high correlation between sensory and bodily development—now largely neglected—and intelligence.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“…who’s clocking 40,000 dollars a year coming up to Marshall with a copy of the book in the hand asking for an autograph with absolute the same degree of abandon and awe. I was really amazed…”

— discussion in the serie ‘Word Count’ on WBAI-FM with John Culkin and Quentin Fiore. Moderator: Samuel Blazer.

“This is another peculiar feature of electric technology; it tends toward decentralized, tailor-made, custom-built servicing.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“{Every new technology creates a new environment in which men live and work.} The technology of the alphabet and of moveable type—printing {—predisposed us to think and act in certain ways.}”

— Marshall McLuhan

“ In other words, it becomes visible because this is the peculiar character of art. It creates attention—it creates perception.”

— 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

“It is the business of the future to be dangerous.”

— A.N. Whitehead, “Science and the Modern World”

“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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“So now in modern advertising there’s much the same revolution going forward as has been going forward in painting and poetry and in the world of entertainment with the audience moving more and more into the act.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“There is a world of difference between the modern home environment of integrated electric information and the classroom.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“A medium creates an environment. An environment is a process—it’s not a wrapper. It’s an action and it goes to work on our nervous system and our sensory lives, completely altering them.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“When automated electronic production reaches full potential, it will be just about as cheap to turn out a million differing objects as a million exact duplicates. The only limits on production and consumption will be the human imagination!”

— 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

“Training will be more concerned with training the senses and perceptions than with stuffing brains.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Do you like your job, Mr Mcluhan?”

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

— 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

“SHE WAS INDIGNANT WHEN I SUGGESTED THE USE OF AN APHRODISIAC. WHY? NATURALLY SHE CONSIDERS TV A WASTE OF TIME.”

— John Cage, “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)”

“[The railroad] created totally new urban, social, and family worlds. New ways of work. New ways of management. New legislation.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The ‘content’ of any medium [/technology] is always [/inevitably] another medium [—the older technology].”

— Marshall McLuhan

“History as she is harped.”

— Harry Levin, “James Joyce” (“The Atlantic” #178) and “Explorations” #8 by 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

“My education was of the most ordinary description, consisting of little more than the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic at a common day school. My hours out of school were passed at home and in the streets.”

— Michael Faraday, quoted in “The Life and Letters of Faraday” by Bence Jones

“The young people today are not goal oriented, they’re role oriented.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[Robert Oppenheimer was fond of saying:] There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoted by Marshall McLuhan in “Address at Vision 65”, p. 12

“The “expert” is the man who stays put.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The book on Xerox becomes somewhat like the safety car. The reader becomes publisher and author.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“In the same way the French Canadians in the electric age have an image of themselves as profoundly participating in the life of Canada and they are offered legally and politically participation only by the most fragmentary and partial forms, like nose counting, voting. They want a role, they want to be part of the significant developing life of Canada and they have nothing offered to them that permits liaison. So they’ve just drop out, that’s all. It’s an involuntary gesture.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“What’s the definition of an Eskimo family?”

““{And} who are you?” [said the Caterpillar.]”

— Lewis Carroll, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”

“Rite words in rote order.”

— James Joyce quoted in “The Gutenberg Galaxy” by Marshall McLuhan and “Explorations” #8 by Marshall McLuhan

“This is the place to see it from fellows.”

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

— announcer

“The newspaper lost its story line when it got telegraphic services. The humpy little stories without the unifying one.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“California didn’t have a nineteenth century. During the nineteenth century people were making their way out there as best they could. There were no factories, there were no cities, there was no industrial life, etcetera, etcetera. Now, note, the result is that, not having had a nineteenth century, the West Coast leapfrogged out of the eighteenth into the twentieth with great advantage to itself.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“However, you see, in Canada, to illustrate again, here’s a country that was shaped by the railway. It was unified from its vast frontier spanned by rail.”

— 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

“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

“The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories [; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves … You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing].”

— Socrates, quoted in “Phaedrus” by Plato, see also “Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press”, p. 2

“{Growing up—that is our new work, and it is total.} [Mere instruction will not suffice.]”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Address at Vision 65” , p. 4

“…Advertising is all good news.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“When you’re dealing simultaneously with several million people, it’s obvious that somebody in that audience is going to have a perceptual perforation into the problem without any difficulty whatever.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“Personal freedom consists largely in having a defence against questions.”

— Elias Canetti, “Crowds and Power”

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“I think it was Steve Allen who said that the funnyman is a man with a grievance. And if you look around at the joke world from that point of view, it’s sometimes rather instructive.”

— 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

“Even so imaginative a writer as Jules Verne failed to envisage the speed with which electric technology would produce informational media. He rashly predicted that television would be invented in the XXIXth Century.”

— 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 typical of our rear-view mirror orientation that we look at all these new technologies as if they were reflexes of the old technology.”

— 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

“Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 8

“For countries like Africa or Indonesia or China, Bonanza must have a very strange aspect. It must look like some distant science-fiction image of some remote world to come, that is, for countries that never had a nineteenth century. And by the way, this also happens to apply to the West Coast.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“It is a matter of the greatest urgency that our educational institutions realize that we now have civil war among these environments created by media other than the printed word.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The mass media are turning the globe into a village and catapulting 20th century man back to the life of the tribe.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“But perhaps the safety car is more an example of the effect of the space capsule. Bucky Fuller is famous for having pointed out, among many brilliant observations, that the space capsule is the first man-made environment. Totally man-made.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The classroom is now in a vital struggle for survival with the immensely persuasive “outside” world created by new informational media.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I derived all my knowledge of media from people like Flaubert and Rimbaud and Baudelaire. They began to study the materials with which they worked in order to be faithful to style. They deliberately began to study the matters, the materials with which they worked. You find Frank Lloyd Wright and modern architects doing this at the turn of the century. They began to study not what they wanted to express, but what were the means available for expression. When they began to study these materials, they quickly discovered that the medium is the massage or message. ”

— Marshall McLuhan

“As the audience becomes a participant in the total electric drama, the classroom can become a scene in which the audience performs an enormous amount of work.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Address at Vision 65” , p. 12

“Real, total war has become information war.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“This gives it a comfortable sense of distance and security. It’s a nineteenth-century image.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Self-portraiture was a very special response to the printed word and was never felt as a need or a response for the manuscript form of culture.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“… technology in the world. It’s educational and industrial establishments build by print and methods derived from print are vast and pervasive.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Many people find it desirable to saddle me with moral judgments and the need for value judgments.

— Marshall McLuhan

“[That is,] if you leapfrog out of one century and leapfrog over a century or two, you can, upon encountering the new conditions, feel completely uncrippled by the older ones. You can behave in a much more spontaneous and much more resourceful way than people who have been through the whole process.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“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

“A cell for citters to cit in.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Xerography—every man’s brain-picker—heralds the times of instant publishing. Anybody can now become both author and publisher. Take any books on any subject and custom-make your own book by simply xeroxing a chapter from this one, a chapter from that one—instant steal!”

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

“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

“One of the biggest revolutions in Western culture occurred when the world of the arts in the eighteenth century began to deliberately create landscapes and environments as a way of controlling mental life.”

— 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

“Now, “the future of”—under electric conditions—suggests an approach to various other things which I might mention while on that theme, the future of the planet as a work of art.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“One of the peculiarities of an electronic environment is that people become so profoundly involved in each other that they lose that sense of private identity.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The idea of detention in a closed space as a form of human punitive corrective action seems to have come in very much in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—at the time perspective and pictorial space was developing in our Western world. The whole concept of enclosure as a means of constraint and as a means of classifying doesn’t work as well in our electronic world.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The flight director says: get back in.” “Back in?” “Back in!” “Roger.” “We’ve been trying to talk to you…”

— Christopher C. Kraft, Jr.

“…a mother, a father, two children and an anthropologist.”

— John Culkin, “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan” (The Saturday Review)

“Until there was a rail connection East-West there was no Canada. And now with airplane and electronic speeds of information movement that whole country is falling apart. It has fallen apart. That is, French separatism is like school dropout-ism, an inability to make contact with an alien form of organisation.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We are proud of our museums where we display a way of living that we have made impossible.”

— A.K. Coomaraswamy, quoted in “Explorations” #8

“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

“The environment as a processor of information is propaganda. Propaganda ends where dialogue begins. You must talk to the media, not the programmer. To talk to the programmer is like complaining to a hot dog vendor at a ballpark about how badly your favorite team is playing.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Science-fiction writing today presents situations that enable us to perceive the potential of new technologies. Formerly, the problem was to invent new forms of labor-saving. Today, the reverse is the problem. Now we have to adjust, not to invent. We have to find the environments in which it will be possible to live with our new inventions. Big Business has learned to tap the s-f writer.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“One of the things that puzzles many people about our world of advertising is that there seems to be such a strange disproportion between the effect of the ad and the content.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“If I don’t smoke, someone else will…”

— Erik Satie quoted in “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” by John Cage

“What does it all say? I’m not too often concerned about this. It’s just a phase.”

“Electric circuitry confers a mythic dimension on our ordinary individual and group actions. Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Unhappily, we confront this new situation with an enormous backlog of outdated mental and psychological responses.”

— 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

“The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions—the patterns of mechanistic technologies—are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier—that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early mistakes.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Lucky cocks for whom the audible-visible-gnosible-edible world existed.”

— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”

“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

“The public consists of separate individuals walking around with separate, fixed points of view. The new [electric] technology demands that we abandon the luxury of this posture, this fragmentary outlook.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 12

“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

“[Seurat] was not painting the technology. He was painting the effect he wanted. The effect he wanted from this TV image or this type of pointillism—the effect he wanted was that of total audience participation, involvement of a multi-sensuous kind. Seurat was consciously aiming at not merely visual but total sensuous involvement. He wanted all the senses to be involved in the painting, and that’s why he used this rear projection.”

— 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”

“Print technology created the public. Electric technology created the mass.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 12

“The strange dynamic or pattern of electric information is to involve the audience increasingly as part of the workforce instead of just tossing things to it as consumer or as entertainment. The tendency is to involve the audience as workforce as with electric toasters, electric razors, electric anything. You do the work. And we’re coming to this. I’ll come back to this perhaps apropos the future of television or forms like that in which it will become possible or is now possible to brief audiences in prime-time on top-level problems in physics, science, whatever, and invite their response to these problems by IBM cards sent out in supermarkets or in magazines.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“For example, 350 million people each week watch Bonanza in sixty-two different countries of the world. What could be a more gloomy image of the human condition? And so on. Actually, Bonanza isn’t that bad a show. There was a little boy in Nairobi a few weeks ago, in Africa, who was found wandering around the city, and on being questioned by the police, he explained he had come from some village, and he was an orphan. And they said, “Yeah, well why are you here?” He said, “I’m looking for Mr. Cartwright. I think he can help me.” And I’m quite sure he could, too.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Even science fiction is now very far behind what is actually happening.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[You mean, like]
… the massage?”

— Sam Zacks

“Whence did the wond’rous mystic art arise, Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes? That we by tracing magic lines are taught, How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?”

— translation of Brébeuf’s verse translation of Lucan’s “Pharsalia” in “The Origin and Progress of Writing” by Thomas Astle

“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 world of electric technology and circuitry then, as involving the audience as workforce, has extraordinary implications. You can see while this development is taking place, while the audience is becoming profoundly involved in making a world of entertainment, the gloom voyeurs stand around classifying the program and providing program ratings of the most unhappy kind. While the audience is about to take over this vast creative act, the gloom voyeurs stand around reading off audience ratings.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Soon, all that will be required of us will be one hour’s work per year.”

— Buckminster Fuller, quoted in “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” by John Cage

“[It’s a little bit like] the Balinese have a saying [/who say]: We have no art. We do everything as well as [possible/] we can.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 73

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

— narrator

“We have never had an educational system programmed to train perception of the outer world, and it will create a considerable trauma or shock to switch into that mode of activity. But it’s like the audience in the entertainment world that is ready to go into action on high-level problems.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The future of the book is very much in the order of book as information service. Instead of the book as a fixed package of repeatable and uniform character suited to the market with pricing—and so on—the book is increasingly taking on the character of service, an information service, and the book as an information service is tailor-made and custom-built.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly and unaware.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“And the end and the beginning were always there. Before the beginning and after the end.”

— T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” (V 10-11)

“We are being taken on an inner trip, into our own inner beings, which involve us, in depth, in things that had formerly been merely superficial, visual, external, and detached from our own beings.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“This need to interface, to confront environments with a certain antisocial power, is manifest in the famous story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” “Well-adjusted” courtiers, having vested interests, saw the Emperor as beautifully appointed. The “antisocial” brat, unaccustomed to the old environment, clearly saw that the Emperor “ain’t got nothin’ on.” The new environment was clearly visible to him.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“David Ogilvy, the advertiser, tends to begin all of his memos with …”

— discussion in the serie ‘Word Count’ on WBAI-FM with John Culkin and Quentin Fiore. Moderator: Samuel Blazer.

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

— narrator

“The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. Mechanical multiples of the same text created a public—a reading public. The rising consumer-oriented culture became concerned with labels of authenticity and protection against theft and piracy. The idea of copyright—”the exclusive right to reproduce, publish, and sell the matter and form of a literary or artistic work”—was born.”

— 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.”

“Primitive, and pre-alphabet people integrate time and space as one and live in an acoustic, horizonless, boundless, olfactory space, rather than in visual space. Their graphic presentation is like an x-ray. They put in everything they know, rather than only what they see. A drawing of a man hunting seal on an ice floe will show not only what is on top of the ice, but what lies underneath as well. The primitive artist twists and tilts the various possible visual aspects until they fully explain what he wishes to represent.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I don’t think you can quite get quite get away with that phrase. Ahum, innumerable, so it suggests numbers. Instead the confusion is singular. I don’t know. Do you like the phrase ‘Innumerable confusion?’” “Well, it’s part of it.” “It’s part of what?” “It’s part of the confusion, sir.” “Ah-ha. Okay, you remind me.”

“The medium is the massage. {The medium is the massage.}”

— parrot

““Cool” means identification with the creative process.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 24

“We have been literary saying: I don’t follow you.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“But as I have become more attentive to the structure of these forms I have become more fascinated. They have tremendous untapped resources that are far in excess of anything men have ever known. So I don’t think there is too much occasion to despond.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We’re only beginning to realize what a tiny slice of human possibility we now educate.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“McLuhan was able to say ‘The medium is the message’ because he started from no concern with content.”

— John Cage, “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)”

“You know all the statistics one hears, again intended to panic people, that by the year 1980, there will be more scientists than people, and more and more and more. What would seem to be, therefore, the future of education in a world in which the proportions of information have been reversed? In ordinary human past, there’d been more in knowledge and information available inside the classroom conditions than outside. With this spectacular reversal of this condition, it would seem to be possible that the business of the school has also reversed, that the business of the school is no longer instruction but discovery.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The museum has become a storehouse of human values, a cultural bloodbank.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“This strange habit of looking backward when moving forward is one that perhaps won’t quite bear up, isn’t quite consistent with jet speeds and electronic speeds.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“And this is a kind of normal human reaction to novelty and innovation. Its inappropriateness as a reaction in no way deters people from this strategy. It’s a kind of déjà vu. Every time you encounter the new, you say, “I’ve been here before, and this isn’t as new as you might think.”, and all that.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“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

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

— 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

“The ear favors no particular “point of view.” We are enveloped by sound. It forms a seamless web around us. We say, “Music shall fill the air.” We never say, “Music shall fill a particular segment of the air.””

— Marshall McLuhan

“Rationality and visuality have long been interchangeable terms, but we do not live in a primarily visual world any more.”

— 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 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

“One of the strange changes that is taking place in our world—and John Cage gave me a curious example of what it meant to him—is that we’re moving out of the world of the planter, out of the world of the specialist, out of the world of the fragmented person into the world of the hunter, the unified person.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“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

“You don’t have to be in anyone favorite position in order to enjoy the advantages of the electric light. You can have it under the Polar ice cap and do, you can have it on the top of the Mount Everest and do. It isn’t a kind of service that is limited to any area. And the same is true of all information in our world, it’s available to everybody at the same time and in the same excellent measure.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The rear-view mirror is a very comforting spot. It gives you a sense of remoteness like Bonanza.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Without an understanding of the media around us we cannot … achieve a temporarily awareness of the world in which we live. Our very concepts of media-analysis are limited. Limited to quantum analysis, and unrelated to the new configurations of electronic media. Our sensory levels have already changed aggressively since television.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Even as we pour and lavish our nineteenth-century technology on the East, we are doing to ourselves the exact opposite. We are Orientalizing ourselves by going inward. And it’s very easy to see them going westward, but very difficult to see ourselves going inward because it is so environmental with us that it becomes almost imperceptible. You can, however, if you do inventory, discover the amazing rise of Oriental values in the arts and in all sorts of produce and all sorts of habits. And I’m sure they could by similar inventories find that the West made considerable inroads into their world.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The alphabet is a construct of fragmented bits and parts which have no semantic meaning in themselves, and which must be strung together in a line, bead-like, and in a prescribed order. Its use fostered and encouraged the habit of perceiving all environment in visual and spatial terms—particularly in terms of a space and of a time that are uniform, c,o,n,t,i,n,u,o,u,s and c-o-n-n-e-c-t-e-d.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Stone. They delight to see a configuration in stone that resembles a walrus tusk or eh …”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I wouldn’t be seen dead with a living work of art.”

— Museum Curator

“In our time there are a great many unhappy people who see the great art treasures of the past being polluted by a corrupt new vulgar environment. It never occurs to them perhaps their job is the penetration and exploration of these new environments, and that the mere accumulation of past human experience in blood banks called art does not really contribute very much toward the perception of our current environment.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The hunter is not concerned with classification or specialism or the processes of cultivation, only with discovery.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

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

“The magic of strangers who live far off is greatly dreaded.”

— Elias Canetti, “Crowds and Power”

“We speak of the “serious” student. Our time presents a unique opportunity for learning by means of humor—a perceptive or incisive joke can be more meaningful than platitudes lying between two covers.”

— 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

“The student finds no means of involvement for himself and cannot discover how the educational scheme relates to his mythic world of electronically processed data and experience that his clear and direct responses report.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“With the public [print], the audience was detached, observant, but not involved. With circuitry, the reader, the audience becomes involved in itself and in the process of publishing.”

— 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

“I think there’s lots of evidence, though, for the fact that the moment you encounter the unknown you translate it back into the known. This means that we never encounter the unknown. We encounter only convenient self-deceptions.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“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

“You will find this quite unanimously expressed by Flaubert and Baudelaire and others. Flaubert’s way of putting it was simply, “Style is by itself an absolute way of perceiving things.” 3 That style is not a way of expressing something. It’s a way of seeing, of knowing.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The main cause for disappointment in and for criticism of television is the failure on the part of its critics to view it as a totally new technology which demands different sensory responses. These critics insist on regarding television as merely a degraded form of print technology. Critics of television have failed to realize that the motion pictures they are lionizing—such as “The Knack”, “Hard Day’s Night”, “What’s New Pussycat?”—would prove unacceptable as mass audience films if the audience had not been preconditioned by television commercials to abrupt zooms, elliptical editing, no story lines, flash cuts.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“In the movie, the audience is the camera; the audience looks out at the environment. With TV, the audience is the environment, is the screen, is the vanishing point. And this creates a completely different relation to programming. It creates a kind of Oriental effect with reverse perspective.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“Writing was an embalming process that froze language. It eliminated the art of ambiguity and made puns the lowest form of wit.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all of us, al att once. No detachment or frame is possible.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“Since the planet has as its new environment of satellites and electronic information, it is rapidly becoming an old nose cone, a work of art like the Model T.”

— 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

“Fragmentation by means of visual stress occurs in that isolation of moment in time, or aspect in space, that is beyond the power of touch, or hearing, or smell, or movement. By imposing unvisualizable relationships that are the result of instant speed, electric technology dethrones the visual sense and restores us to the dominion of synesthesia, and the close interinvolvement of the other senses.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Now for the evidence,” said the King, “and then the sentence”. “No!” said the Queen, “first the sentence, and then the evidence!” “Nonsense!” cried Alice, so loudly that everybody jumped, “the idea of having the sentence first!”

— Lewis Carroll, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”

“And the changes are very much like the changes between the old dance style and the new dance style. In the old dance style you moved around the dance floor, you asked people for dances, you changed partners. Now you move out on the floor and you sculpture. They call it through for suzy whatla. You make images, you can’t ask anybody for a dance on that floor. There’s no way of getting in. It’s a closed world. It’s profound, it has depth, whereas the old Foxtrot world was an exceedingly superficial, although cheerful world and to which I belong.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“And the role of the artist as a creator of perceptual models and of perceptual means is perhaps misunderstood by those who think of art as primarily a blood bank of stored human values.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Writing destroyed word linkages.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The movie world doesn’t call for any participation. It’s a fantasy world, highly visual with the audience sitting very much back from the show. But TV is not like that.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“When you consider television’s awesome power to educate, aren’t you thankful it doesn’t?”

— Donald Reilly, drawing in “The New Yorker”

“We now experience simultaneously the dropout and the teach-in. The two forms are correlative. They belong together. The teach-in represents an attempt to shift education from instruction to discovery, from brainwashing students to brainwashing instructors. It is a big dramatic reversal. Vietnam, as the content of the teach-in, is a very small and perhaps misleading Red Herring. It really has little to do with the teach-in, as such, anymore than with the dropout.”

— Marshall McLuhan, “Address at Vision 65” , p. 11-12

“The tribalizing process, the inner trip, the depth involvement in the experience of the unified human family, that is something of which we’ve had no experience for many centuries. It is a process that is located so entirely in the present that it does not appear at all in the rear-view mirror to which we habitually look to for reassurance and nostalgic orientation.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The circuit as such is a form that feeds back and feeds us into the circuit. All circuits are do-it-yourself objects.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Joyce regarded the human language as the biggest storage system of human knowledge and perception anywhere. And his own use of that vast store of human perception was to retrieve from it in a pattern which made discovery natural: “Though he might have been humble there’s no police like Holmes.” And that’s retrieval.”

— 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

“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

“The artist, the enema of society, points out things that many people would prefer not to notice.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“It’s a time factor. The book created the public because the book, as a printed form, made possible a very large body of people but not simultaneous. The peculiar dimension of the mass audience is that it’s all-at-once. It’s a happening like telegraph, like the daily paper.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Were the Great Blackout of 1965 to have continued for half a year, there would be no doubt how electric technology shapes, works over, alters—massages—every instant of our lives.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The prouts who will invent a writing there ultimately is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the raiding there originally. That’s the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso many counterpoint words. What can’t be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for. Now, the doctrine obtains, we have occasioning cause causing effects and affects occasionally recausing altereffects.”

— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”

“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

“What’s that buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz[ing]?”

— 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 Medium is the Massage is a look-around to see what’s happening. It is a collide-oscope of interfaced situations.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The Newtonian God—the God who made a clocklike universe, wound it, and withdrew—died a long time ago. This is what Nietzsche meant and this is the God who is being observed.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“”Blind,” all-hearing Homer inherited this metaphorical mode of speech, a speech which, like a prism, refracts much meaning to a single point.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Printing completely changed everything. It changed what men thought of themselves, how they behaved towards each other, it changed systems of government. And so on and so on and so on.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“They [I Ching] told me to continue what I was doing, and to spread JOY and revolution.”

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

“Modern advertising is more and more a substitute for the product.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The alphabet and print technology [printing] extended the emphasis upon lineality. It fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment. [A habit of thinking in bits and parts, and step by step.]”

— Marshall McLuhan

“And so to come back a moment to the strange prodigy of the xerographed book, the tendency to involve audience as actor, as publisher, as writer is a characteristic that applies to an enormous amount of electric technology quite apart from this particular instance. It’s a sort of prospect that will increasingly bring us into the need for new instruments of handling our problems.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Next is my page 19. Speech 1. Innumerable confusion.”

“There ain’t no grammatical errors in a non-literate society.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 238

“[But, this is one of my themes tonight, as it were,] the artist as early-warning system for new media.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Now Oppenheimer realizes in that remark that most scientific problems are really not concept problems but percept problems, that most scientists are blocked in their perceptions by preconceptions and prepossessions.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all.”

— John Cage, “Silence: Lectures and Writings”

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment—of what’s really going on—affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions. Older societies thrived on purely literary plots. They demanded story lines. Today’s humor, on the contrary, has no story line—no sequence. It is usually a compressed overlay of stories.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“… Marshall himself says all he does is describing—prescribing.”

— discussion in the serie ‘Word Count’ on WBAI-FM with John Culkin and Quentin Fiore. Moderator: Samuel Blazer.

“This is McLuhan number 3, take 2.” “Take 3.” “2 this is.” “No.” “Number 2?” “Alright number 2. Because the other was number 2.” “Alright number 2, take 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

“Give any form at all a new environment and it acquires art status.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We employ visual and spatial metaphors for a great many everyday expressions. We insist on employing visual metaphors even when we refer to purely psychological states, such as tendency and duration. For instance, we say thereafter when we really mean thenafter, always when we mean at all times. We are so visually biased that we call our wisest men visionaries, or seers!”

— Marshall McLuhan

“There’s another basic theme associated with this computer threat to job holding.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“But the story line not only disappeared in humor, you know all the vast new group of jokes in many areas that have many effects but no stories [, like:]”

— Marshall McLuhan

“In his amusement born of rational detachment of his own situation, Poe’s mariner in “The Descent into the Maelstrom” staved off disaster by understanding the action of the whirlpool. His insight offers a possible stratagem for understanding our predicament, our electrically-configured whirl.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Wars, revolutions, civil uprisings are interfaces within the new environments created by electric informational media.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“With the electronic music instrument, any tone can be made available in any intensity and for any length of time. Note that the older symphony orchestra was, by comparison, a machine of separate instruments that gave the effect of organic unity. With the electronic instrument, one starts with organic unity as an immediate act of perfect synchronization. This makes the attempt to create the effect of organic unity quite pointless. Electronic music must seek other goals.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“In Canada we have jokes such as the one about: mouse being pursued by the cat, and finally hiding under the floor, and all is quiet until suddenly there’s a kind of a “bow wow arf arf” sound. And the mouse figures, ah, house dog has come, scared cat away, and up comes the mouse and the cat grabs it. As the cat chews the mouse down, it says, “You know, it pays to be bilingual.””

— Marshall McLuhan

“Four P.M. throughout the world. Whether we like it or not…”

— Buckminster Fuller, quoted in “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” by John Cage

“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

“The way to study the effects, for example, if you wanted to study what the motorcar was, you might find out more from what it did to the environment and the community.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The pun as a form of retrieval brushes various layers and contexts together and creates a new discovery pattern.”

— 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

“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

“In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!”

— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”

“Hollywood is often a fomenter of anti-colonialist revolutions.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We might come back to that theme during questions.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Nothing can be further from the spirit of the new technology than “a place for everything and everything in its place.” You can’t go home again.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Everyone has the best seat.”

— John Cage, “Silence: Lectures and Writings”

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“[George Washington once remarked,] “We haven’t heard from Benjamin Franklin in Paris this year. We should write him a letter.””

— George Washington

“The eye—it cannot choose but see; we cannot bid the ear be still; our bodies feel, where’er they be, against or with our will.”

— William Wordsworth, “Expostulation and Reply”

“Westmoreland gets control of pacification program in Vietnam.”

— newspaper

“Most often the few seconds sandwiched between the hours of viewing—the “commercials”—reflect a truer understanding of the medium. There simply is no time for the narrative form, borrowed from earlier print technology. The story line must be abandoned. Up until very recently, television commercials were regarded as simply a bastard form, or vulgar folk art. They are influencing contemporary literature. Vide “In Cold Blood”, for instance.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Under conditions of electric circuitry, all the fragmented job patterns tend to blend once more into involving and demanding roles or forms of work that more and more resemble teaching, learning, and “human” service, in the older sense of dedicated loyalty.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I have been introduced quite recently as Canada’s revenge on the United States. You know, from the land of the DEW Line, the early-warning system.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Until WRITING was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion {, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog}.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Counterblast” (1954)

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“But, you see, advertisers have been puzzled for a long time in their surveys to discover that people don’t really read ads until they own the thing. If you own that icebox or that car, then you notice the ads very much because this is how you get your satisfaction. The ad world then becomes an enormous area of information service, part of the service industries, enabling you to substitute the effect for the thing, just like Picasso.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Speak that I may see you.”

— Marshall McLuhan, “Counterblast” (1954)

“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

“This feeling [of guilt] seems to be returning to our midst. In tribal societies we are told that it is a familiar reaction, when some hideous event occurs, for some people to say, “How horrible it must be to feel like that,” instead of blaming somebody for having done something horrible. This feeling is an aspect of the new mass culture we are moving into—a world of total involvement in which everybody is so profoundly involved with everybody else and in which nobody can really imagine what private guilt can be anymore.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 52

“The real breakthrough here people, the fact people don’t understand. The number of people who say you use words because he’s explaining television that he’s somehow against use words. We have to.. people will think… tho see for themselves. We really need footnotes derived from the visual arts, from graphic art, from sound, from music…”

“It was a matter of immediate response on the part of writers that their task as writers would be from now on the etiolation, the evolving of self-portrait, an image. There was no such impulse or response in the Middle Ages, when they had the scribe-and-manuscript culture, or in the ancient world. It was with the coming of the printed book that people suddenly felt the need to reflect, to bounce their image off this public as a form of self-expression, self-portraiture.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[The circuited city of the future] will be an information megalopolis. What remains of the configuration of former “cities” will be very much like World’s Fairs—places in which to show off new technology, not places of work or residence. They will be preserved, museumlike, as living monuments to the railway era. If we were to dispose of the city now, future societies would reconstruct them, like so-many Williamsburgs.”

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

“It may be that we are the first human generation to feel the need for a close look at what’s actually happening under our noses instead of that rear-view mirror look.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The simultaneous interrelations between many levels of meaning of the word have to be sacrificed in keeping everything moving on a single plane on one level. The word became the static symbol, applicable to and separable from that which it symbolized. It now belonged to the objective world; it could be seen. It was a thing. Now came the distinction between being and meaning.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Xerox or xerography enables the reader to become publisher, and this is an important aspect of all electric circuitry. The audience is increasingly involved in the process.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“There are a lot of those jokes around up there, and… I think it is rather amusing to watch the joke as a sign of grievance.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Typography cracked the voices of silence.”

— Marshall McLuhan, “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 250

“There is no connection between the items otherwise than the dateline. And if you take away the dateline from any newspaper whatever, you have a quite handsome surrealist poem. It becomes much more enjoyable if you pull the dateline off.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“This seems to tie in with the ancient theory of human learning as needfully going from the known to the unknown. I don’t think there’s too much evidence that this is a basic pattern of human learning.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Antienvironments, or countersituations made by artists, provide means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly. The interplay between the old and the new environments creates many problems and confusions.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 6 and 7

“Well, the painters knew this. I learned this from the later-nineteenth-century painters, all this stuff about the media that I talk about I learned from them.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“TV is not a narrative medium. And attempts to keep it in the narrative mold have been rather unhappy.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Finnegans Wake is a book built entirely on this retrieval system: “Casting her perils before swains.” This is a phrase out of Finnegan, and it’s typical of the technique of Finnegan.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Those who lived through the nineteenth century lived through the most stupefying and fragmenting and systematizing and categorizing century in human history. Therefore, anybody who leapfrogged over the nineteenth century might retain some imaginative life. And those who went through the nineteenth century were maimed and mutilated very horribly because of this enormous power to fragment and systematize and classify everything that happens.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Ok now, once more with more expression.”

“In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.”

— A. N. Whitehead, “Adventures in Ideas”

“The goose’s quill put an end to talk. It abolished mystery; it gave architecture and towns; it brought roads and armies, bureaucracy. It was the basic metaphor with which the cycle of CIVILIZATION began, the step from the dark into the light of the mind. The hand that filled the parchment page built a city.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Counterblast” (1954)

“Art, or the graphic transition of a culture, is shaped by the way space is perceived. Since the Renaissance the Western artist perceived his environment primarily in terms of the visual. Everything was dominated by the eye of the beholder. His conception of space was in terms of a perspective projection upon a plane surface consisting of formal units of spatial measurement. he accepted the dominance of the vertical and the horizontal—of symmetry—as an absolute condition of order. This view is deeply embedded in the consciousness of Western art.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The wrath of Achilles is my theme. That fatal wrath {, which—in fulfilment of the will of Zeus—brought the Achaeans so much suffering and sent the gallant souls of many noblemen to Hades, leaving their bodies as carrion for the dogs and passing birds. Let us begin, goddess of song, with the angry parting that took place between Agamemnon King of Men and the great Achilles, son of Peleus. Which of the gods was it that made them quarrel?}”

— Homer, “Iliad”

“Anyway, this kind of inwardness, and this self inspection and inquisition, and profound earnestness and seriousness, lack of playfulness, and so on, is a very much a part of the oriental in our own lives.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I have a bit of a cold. And it feels very strange—I’m very pleased to be here but it feels very strange to be here while I was out there listening a few nights ago to Arthur Koestler. It’s a very strange change of roles.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[For example, if one wanted to talk about] the future of work in our world, we know that it has very little to do with jobs as they’re presently understood. It has much to do with discovery, much to do with knowing, much to do with involvement in processes so much so that the future of work is plainly knowing.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“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

“But, electric technology doesn’t centralise, it decentralises human energies, because it makes possible anything happening anywhere at the same time.”

— 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

“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

“The editorial page by contrast represents a point of view, a fixed, arrested position with regard to the happening. The editorial is very closely related to the book as a form.”

— 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 shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us…”

— John Culkin, “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan” (The Saturday Review)

“The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of cultures.”

— Marshall McLuhan, “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 48

“”Precision” is sacrificed for a greater degree of suggestion. Myth is the mode of simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We are back in acoustic space. {We have begun again to structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us.}”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Counterblast” (1954)

“Tony Schwartz is in the audience tonight, bless him, and he is an expert in this very department. In terms of auditory magic, the power of giving effect without thing is entirely within his domain.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[The Balinese] think of art as that which applies to the environment. They program the environment. Art for them means dealing with the environment itself as if it were a work of art. And this, I think, is one of the meanings of pop art.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Unhappily, many well-intentioned political reform programs that aim at the alleviation of suffering caused by unemployment betray an ignorance of the true nature of media-influence.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We’re getting unclustered, eh…”

“Britain formally applies for membership in the [European Common] market.”

— newspaper

“Our Renaissance legacy was the vanishing point. The single static viewpoint of the limited optical science of the time. This single piercing view demanded a central point of interest and an undisturbed restful symmetry to either side of it.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“When I mentioned this to John Cage, he said, “You know, that’s very interesting. I spend my life hunting mushrooms. I am not the least bit interested in cultivating them.” This is a curious illustration of the difference between the two kinds of man.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Isn’t it strange that no matter how complicated slang is, no child ever made a mistake in slang, and that goes even for the word cool.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The dateline presents a plausible pretext of rationality, meaning, connection, which is not really very deeply related to the newspaper. The sort of constellation of events that is incorporated on any page of a newspaper is a kind of environmental image for which many people find it natural to identify empathetically, and so on. And the paper as a happening is very much in this dimension of the all-at-once.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“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

“The technology of the railway created the myth of a green pasture world of innocence. It satisfied man’s desire to withdraw from society, symbolized by the city, to a rural setting where he could recover his animal and natural self. It was the pastoral ideal, a Jeffersonian world, an agrarian democracy which was intended to serve as a guide to social policy.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“You never knew what was coming next.”

“I done me best when I was let.”

— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”

“Just as pre-shaped parts became components of, say, an airplane, human specialists became components of a great SOCIAL machine.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“And the future work of mankind will be mainly raking and tidying and clipping the old planet, putting it in shape, reconstructing it pretty much the way it was when the pilgrims landed, and that sort of thing.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“These Bardic songs were rhythmically organized with great formal mastery into metrical patterns which insured that everyone was psychologically attuned to memorization and to easy recall. There was no ear illiteracy in pre-literate Greece.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The meaning of meaning … is meaning.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“And now a word from our sponsor…”

“Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The hell of it is those punks pump over fifteen billion dollars into the economy every year.”

— Lorenz, drawing in “The New Yorker”

“Okay, professor McLuhan, let’s take it from the top.”

“Michael Faraday, who had little mathematics and no formal schooling beyond the primary grades, is celebrated as an experimenter who discovered the induction of electricity. He was one of the great founders of modern physics. It is generally acknowledged that Faraday’s ignorance of mathematics contributed to his inspiration, that it compelled him to develop a simple, nonmathematical concept when he looked for an explanation of his electrical and magnetic phenomena. Faraday had two qualities that more than made up for his lack of education: fantastic intuition and independence and originality of mind.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The sheer amount of levels of information outside in the environment far exceed the amount of data and information inside the classroom. Now, this is not just of very recent origin. It’s occurring more and more rapidly and on a much bigger and bigger scale.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Take a Picasso painting such as Man Sitting in Chair. You see no chair. You see no man. But the painting is designed to convey the effect of sitting in a chair, not the appearance. Not what it looks like, but what it feels like. Now, this painting the effect minus the appearances is a means of involvement. And the painters and poets alike sought increasingly the techniques of involvement in our time.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“This gentleman has asked if I could merely give some examples of influences of orientalizing in our own lives. A curious example comes to mind in the life of Thomas Mörten, who as you know, became a trappist monk years, quite a few years ago and who has, he merged from that monastery to become a hermit. He finds the corporate life of a monastery all together too vulgar, brash and noisy. For his inward life he has removed himself from that brash community into a silent hut.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Well, I’m going to have a pleasant few minutes here. And I’m going to break at nine o’clock so that some people can be seated. And then we’ll continue and have a few questions—after a bit of chatting.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“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

“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

“For heaven knows how long, people have encountered each new technology by translating it back into the old familiar one. You know all the types of examples of that.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Often we do not know what we think till a question is put to us.”

— Elias Canetti, “Crowds and Power”

“Then there’s a story which illustrates the kind of pun that is not customary in literary society. The story of the boy scout who helped a nun across the street.”

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

— narrator

“I wanna to ask you what’d you expect McLuhan would be doing once he’s there next year—or later this year. We have .. There’s a friend of mine at Fordham who’s on the faculty… and, eh, he’s writing a booklet called: ‘What to do until McLuhan comes’.”

— discussion in the serie ‘Word Count’ on WBAI-FM with John Culkin and Quentin Fiore. Moderator: Samuel Blazer.

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“[But, ] one of the hopeful things about the computer is this: that as a retrieval system, the instantaneous speed of retrieval by computer offers a tremendous future of discovery.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“A great many people are confused and unhappy at the present time because they sense that all the great values of the past are being polluted and corrupted, anemicized, by vulgar entertainment, mass entertainment. So, in that regard let’s pause a moment on the future of the book.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“It has been largely irritation with these new forms that has made me consider their properties—not fascination, but irritation.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The dominant organ of sensory and social orientation in pre-alphabet societies was the ear—hearing was believing. The phonetic alphabet forced the magic world of the ear to yield to the neutral world of the eye.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“It’s rather paradoxical to say that poetry is a more involving experience than prose when in actual fact most people read prose and very few read poetry. But in terms of effect this is true. And it’s the same with painting.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[And[ in fact, you’ll find the great instructors in all media matters are these painters and poets of the later nineteenth century and people like James Joyce and Eliot and Pound and others. They spent their lives studying our senses as they go out technologically into the environment because they realized this had a profound effect on language and on the medium that they were working with as poets.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Nowadays a fact is what has been translated into words or images. [Those qualities cease form to combine fact and drag me upon the opinion of acquainted wit.]”

— Jacques Ellul, “The Political Illusion”

“Today’s child is growing up absurd, because it lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Address at Vision 65” , p. 4

“In a world or profound involvement, identity seems to evaporate.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Like easel painting, the printed book added much to the new cult of individualism. The private, fixed point of view became possible and literacy conferred the power of detachment, of non-involvement.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Young people are looking for a formula for putting on the universe—participation mystique. They do not look for detached patterns—for ways of relating themselves to the world, à la nineteenth century.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“You know the old saying, “You can’t take it with you.” With the space capsule you’ve gotta take it with you. You have to take the planet with you. So the space capsule is really a kind of complete environment in which all consequences of all maneuvers are anticipated by design, by the built-in design pattern.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively apposed, put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— narrator

“The car is what it does to people and what it does to the environment, and so with any other medium, as far as I know.”

— 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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“Television completes the cycle of the human sensorium. With the omnipresent ear and the moving eye, we have abolished writing, the specialized acoustic-visual metaphor that established the dynamics of Western civilization.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We are back once more in the age of the hunter. This time the hunter is a fact finder and a researcher and a discoverer.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“…what has been worked over to give it a general character very very few people can experience directly.”

— Jacques Ellul, “The Political Illusion”

“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

“Anybody who wants to be taken over by a computer should just specialize.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“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

“Writing encouraged an analytical mode of thinking, with emphasis upon lineality, continuity and connectedness. In other words, visuality.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Western history was shaped for some three thousand years by the introduction of the phonetic alephbet, a medium that depends solely on the eye for comprehension.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“So cool is involving, hot is not.”

“So cool is involving, hot is not.”— 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

“I… the trouble is, I keep thinking of improvements on these passages all the time…”

— 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

“Oᴜʀꜱ is the first age in which many thousands of the best trained minds have made it a full time business to get inside the collective public mind. To get inside in order to manipulate, exploit, control.”

— Marshall McLuhan, “The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man”, p. v

“Anyone who is looking around for a simulated icon of the deity in Newtonian guise might well be disappointed. The phrase “God is dead” applies aptly, correctly, validly to the Newtonian universe which is dead. The groundrule of that universe, upon which so much of our Western world is built, has dissolved.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Many people don’t seem to recognize very easily that a cartoon, a mere outline, a mere contour is a profoundly involving experience that requires participation of all our senses. Whereas a photograph is more limited to one sense, the visual merely, whereas a cartoon, although it seems much simpler, is actually more profound in involving our senses, our sensuous lives.”

— 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

“The function of Romantic art or picturesque art was to control moods. It was all oriented toward effect.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Audience as vanishing point creates a reverse perspective with a kind of Orientalism involved. It’s not accidental, I think, that our Western world is taking on many profound Oriental traits since television. But it’s not just television. It’s electric circuitry.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“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

“The visual component in our lives has dropped tremendously. The visceral, the kinetic, and auditory modes of response have risen to compensate. This sensory shift has forced us to re-evaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Address at Vision 65” , p. 10

“Jacques Ellul, the author of Propaganda, points out that in our twentieth-century world the child is the hardest working child in all human history. Our children in a twentieth-century information environment have to process more data than any human being in any previous culture of the world. Our children from early infancy are engaged in extraordinarily hard work, and that work is mainly just growing, growing up because to grow up in a modern electronic environment is a fantastically complex and difficult job.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“That is our children, you see live in a world in which—I’m not saying it is profoundly integrated of say content or programming but in the sense of everything happening at once and everything affecting everything—our children live in a world which they feel isn’t profoundly unified. They go into a schoolroom where all subjects are classified, separate and unrelated to each other and they’re really baffled.”

— 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

“We have already reached a point where remedial control, born out of knowledge of media and their total effects on all of us, must be exerted.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The television generation is a grim bunch. It is much more serious than children of any other period—when they were frivolous, more whimsical. The television child is more earnest, more dedicated.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Show me something new; I’ll begin all over again.”

— John Cage, “Silence: Lectures and Writings”

“Advertisements are all good; the news is all bad.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Address at Vision 65” , p. 8

“Electric circuitry is recreating in us the multi-dimensional space orientation of the “primitive”.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 42

“In the ancient days of the scribe in manuscript cultures, the scribe was both publisher and author. And we are sort of circling around to that condition again in which with Xerox the reader of the book can excerpt it and relate it to any other excerpts or any other notions or any other soundtracks and publish it as his own creative effort. And this is already happening.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“You know, a thing like In Cold Blood would have been a novel 20, 30 years ago. In Cold Blood is like Dr Zhivago the account of a huge upheaval within our own sensory life. It’s like the safety car: radical change of orientation. It’s a revolution. And it doesn’t depend on a story line so much as on an environmental shaping of energy.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“{As [the] new [electric] technologies come into play, people are less and less convinced of the importance of self-expression.} Teamwork succeeds private effort.”

— Marshall McLuhan

”…as much as I love you. And I must…”

“The new electric drama has left us d-a-n-g-l-i-n-g. Our most impressive words and thoughts betray us—they refer us only to the past, not to the present.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— 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

“It’s like Peace Corps. Peace Corps isn’t a goal activity, it’s role, it’s involvement. And we need Peace Corps activity at home. It’s ridiculous to think of Peace Corps as something that should be going on in remote parts of the world. It should be done on our own campuses.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The clash [between two great technologies] naturally occurs in transitional periods. In late medieval art, for instance, we saw the fear of the new print technology expressed in the theme The Dancer of Death. Today, similar fears are expressed in the Theater of the Absurd.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Today’s television child is attuned to up-to-the-minute “adult” news—inflation, rioting, war, taxes, crime, bathing beauties—and is bewildered when he enters the nineteenth century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules. It is naturally an environment much like any factory set-up with its inventories and assembly lines.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Address at Vision 65” , p. 4

“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

“The printed book created what we call the public. With the coming of electric circuitry, you have what is called the mass.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We have now become aware of the possibility of arranging the entire human environment as a work of art, as a teaching machine designed to maximize perception and to make everyday learning a process of discovery. Application of this knowledge would be the equivalent of a thermostat controlling room temperature. It would seem only reasonable to extend such controls to all the sensory thresholds of our being. We have no reason to be grateful to those who juggle these thresholds in the name of haphazard innovation.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“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

“The “child” was an invention of the seventeenth century; he did not exist in, say, Shakespeare’s day. He had, up until that time, been merged in the adult world and there was nothing that could be called childhood in our sense.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Visual space is uniform, continuous, and connected. The rational man in our Western culture is a visual man. The fact that most conscious experience has little “visuality” in it is lost on him.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“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

“It begins to be evident that ‘touch’ is not skin but the interplay of the senses, and ‘keeping in touch’ or ‘getting in touch’ is a matter of a fruitful meeting of the senses, of sight translated into sound and sound into movement, and taste and smell. The ‘common sense’ was for many centuries held to be the peculiar human power of translating one kind of experience of one sense into all the senses, and presenting the result continuously as a unified image to the mind. In fact, this image of a unified ratio among the senses was long held to be the mark of our rationality, and may in the computer age easily become so again.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[Another main theme of course will be that] the medium is the massage and not the message—it really works us over, it really takes hold and massages the population in a savage way.”

— 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

“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

“Man was given an eye for an ear.”

— Marshall McLuhan, “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 26

“Well, if you take a sentence like “The medium is the message”, which is, you know, misunderstood. People who don’t read McLuhan or got comments on McLuhan they say Oh, well, of course, content is part of the message too. And they think they have said something. They haven’t understood what it really means.”

— discussion in the serie ‘Word Count’ on WBAI-FM with John Culkin and Quentin Fiore. Moderator: Samuel Blazer.

“Now, one of the strange effects that TV has had on the movie has been the deprivament of the story line. In the Fellini world, stripping off story line is a normal result of speed up—electric technology.”

— 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

“Sneed Martin, Larson E. Whipsnade, Chester Snavely, A. Pismo Clam, J. P. Pinkerton Snoopington, Mahatma Kane Jeeves—he was always the man on the flying trapeze. On the stage, on the silver screen, all through his life, he swung between the ridiculous and the sublime, using humor as a probe.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“All dictators inflating bureaucracy do it with the cry: “Down with bureaucracy!””

— Jacques Ellul, “The Political Illusion”

“Now Xerox has brought a kind of revolution into the publishing world that is only being felt slowly. It will be felt more and more. Xerox is the application of electric circuitry to a world which had formerly been merely mechanical and fragmented.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The invention of typography confirmed and extended the new visual stress [of applied knowledge]. It provided the first uniformly repeatable “commodity”, the first assembly-line [and the first] mass-production.”

— Marshall McLuhan, “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 124

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

— narrator

“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

“[Real, total war] is being fought by subtle electric informational media—under cold conditions, and constantly. The cold war is the real war front—a surround—involving everybody—all the time—everywhere.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The total environment is now the great teacher.”

— 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

“But the possibility of retrieval as a form of discovery is something we all know from our own memories. When we recall something, we tend to make discoveries. We certainly tend to make changes in the pattern of the thing we know.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Those who write the anatomy of experience then suppose that these divisions inhere in the very constitution of human nature.”

— John Dewey, “Art as Experience”

“The fragmenting of activities, our habit of thinking in bits and parts—”specialism”—reflected the step-by-step linear departmentalizing process inherent in the technology of the alphabet.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“One of the—in these terms and I’m going to pause here for a few questions, after this observation—one of the peculiar results of this profound involvement through circuitry as compared with the old detachment of literacy and visual culture has been the increasing Orientalization of the Western world.”

— 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

“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

“Some of them looked pretty good in them.”

“[I]f you make an inventory of all the changes that have taken place in the last twelve, fifteen years since TV, without any preconceptions, without any theories about what television is or what television does, if one merely made an inventory of all the changes in speech, in politics, in habits of human association, habits of reading, habits of dress and food, it might become quite evident that there had been a kind of a pattern of change.”

— 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

“But this may serve as a last—or break—example for the kind of change that is going on in our own midst—we’re doing this to ourselves, nobody is doing this to us—we are Orientalizing ourselves while Westernizing the East, and seemingly taking much credit to ourselves for the Westernizing and not even noticing what we’re doing to ourselves.”

— 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

“Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.”

— Meister Eckhardt

“So, Canada is in a peculiar position, by the way. Canada never had anything but a nineteenth century, that is, Canada was invented in the nineteenth century.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The eighteenth-century artist, whether in painting or in poetry or in landscaping and city building—the eighteenth-century artist created landscapes, what he called the picturesque, making things look as if they already were framed in pictures. And he found that these landscapes or picturesque situations could be used as a means of controlling the mental life of the observer.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Eight scientists working on a problem for fifty years might not get through, but ten million people working on the problem for ten minutes might get through.”

— 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

“Learning, the educational process, has long been associated only with the glum.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Sheep, who die silently, are no use as victims.”

— Elias Canetti, “Crowds and Power”

“The alphabet, for instance, is a technology that is absorbed by the very young child in a completely unconscious manner, by osmosis so to speak. Words and the meaning of words predispose the child to think and act automatically in certain ways.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“This is one of the peculiar cruxes of our time that people, precisely because they become profoundly involved in one another in an all-at-once simultaneous field of happenings, then begin to lose their sense of private identity because identity used to be connected with simple classification and fragmentation and non-involvement.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— narrator

“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

“[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

“And this is called non-objective abstract art. Now you see it, now you don’t see it. And so on.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Myth means putting on the audience, putting on one’s environment. The Beatles do this. They are a group of people who suddenly were able to put on their audience and the English language with musical effects—putting on a whole vesture, a whole time, a Zeit.”

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

“[The medium of our time,] electric circuitry, profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“An astronomer looking through a 200-inch telescope exclaimed that it was going to rain. His assistant asked, “How can you tell?” “Because my corns hurt.””

— Marshall McLuhan

“He also doesn’t make very many value judgements or suggestions about what people should do about these things.”

— discussion in the serie ‘Word Count’ on WBAI-FM with John Culkin and Quentin Fiore. Moderator: Samuel Blazer.

“The medium is the mass age, great!”

“I have a friend. Every time he sees an empty telephone booth he ducks in to make a call.”

“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

“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

“[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”

“You know how the elite artists, the blood-bank people, are shocked by pop art because they try to classify the content of pop art. Instead of viewing pop art as a means of perception, they think of it as a means of classification, as merely a means of ratings. The idea that it might have a function just training human perception doesn’t seem to get through easily to these people.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Anyway, audience participation can mean many things. You remember in the old quiz shows the audience was browned off when it discovered that the shows had been rigged, and they had really been left out. There was nothing dishonest about rigging quiz shows any more than there is about rigging a movie and making it look different from what a real-life situation might. But it was a misuse of the medium of TV, which calls for much participation.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“…if you talk with Marshall, the conversations are brilliant, exciting and stimulating.”

— discussion in the serie ‘Word Count’ on WBAI-FM with John Culkin and Quentin Fiore. Moderator: Samuel Blazer.

“But many people have difficulty with that term, especially when I use it. Actually, I merely draw it from the world of slang in which it means involved and detached at the same time like a surgeon operating.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“And this would be a scientific report in the usual way of an induction. No conclusions. Just here are the changes that have taken place in the past fifteen years in all these fields since TV. And you could in turn look at that same curve in relation to some other technology if you chose.”

— 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

“Did you happen to meet any soldiers, my dear, as you came through the woods?”

— Lewis Carroll, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”

“Are you living in today’s world?”

— narrator

“you”

“TV is a profoundly involving medium with the audience as environment, the audience as vanishing point, the audience as screen.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Marshall McLuhan”, “Marshall McLuhan.”

— parrot

“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

“This is the meaning of James Bond, it’s the meaning of the sleuth, the meaning of the obsession with crime in our world, because the criminal or the criminologist alike are both hunters. They belong to the old paleolithic world and are really a new type of human being in our midst—the person who explores the total human environment the way the old hunter and the food-gatherer used to explore his entire environment as a unified field. Because man the planter, man the basket-weaver, man the pot-maker, and so on, came in after the paleolithic man, and we’ve had thousands of years of the planter.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Well, the future of work as knowing, the future of identity as involvement, brings one around to the idea of perhaps roles instead of jobs.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Most people find it difficult to understand purely verbal concepts. They suspect the ear; they don’t trust it. In general we feel more secure when things are visible, when we can “see for ourselves.” We admonish children, for instance, to “believe only half of what they see, and nothing of what they hear.” All kinds of “shorthand” systems of notation have been developed to help us see what we hear.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Visual punning as opposed to mere verbal punning, is something that is beginning to happen again in our electronic time… And, uh, it is one of the pet activities of Eskimos. They delight in spotting visual puns in the ordinary environment in various materials.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“As we move into the world of integral, computerized knowledge, mere classification becomes secondary and inadequate to the speeds with which data can now be processed. We are moving out of the world of data classification into the world of pattern recognition.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Address at Vision 65” , p. 4

“Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“At alls will?”

“What we plan to do, or can do, to brainwash ourselves of this obsolete inheritance has yet to be faced.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Thirty spokes are made one by holes in a hub,
By vacancies joining them for a wheel’s use;
The use of clay in molding pitchers
Comes from the hollow of its absence.
Doors, windows, in a house,
Are used for their emptiness.
Thus we are helped by what is not,
To use what is.”

— Laotze, “Tao Te Ching”

“No erasure of any sense.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The medium is the mess age.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Movies are better than ever!”

— 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

“I know, I know.”

“Just psychically, what is the consequence of skipping thousands and thousands of years of Western history? No one knows. It hasn’t been thought about.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“A new form of “politics” is emerging, and in ways we haven’t yet noticed. The living room has become a voting booth. Participation via television in Freedom Marches, in war, revolution, pollution, and other events is changing everything.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“The West shall shake the East awake… while ye have the night for the morn…”

— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”

“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

“I’ve never been here before.”

— Lewis Carroll, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”

“1-2, 1-2-3-4”

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

— Marshall McLuhan/narrator

“Writing did not merely record language, it was a totally new medium of expression and communication which the spoken word came in turn to imitate.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Nose-counting, a cherished part of the eighteenth-century fragmentation process, has rapidly become a cumbersome and ineffectual form of social assessment in an environment of instant electric speeds. The public, in the sense of a great consensus of separate and distinct viewpoints, is finished.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“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 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

“Good Morning!”

“Where is A, it precedes B, and B follows A, and precedes C.”

— Bertrand Russell, “The Prinicple of Individuation” in “Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits”

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“The viewer of Renaissance art is systematically placed outside the frame of experience. A piazza for everything and everything in its piazza.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The children in our school system at the present time have very high-level information resources both in their own makeup and nervous systems and in the world immediately accessible to them, and they can be given the task, in teams, of researching all sorts of fascinating problems.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— 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

“I have a friend who speaks of the motorcar as the “carsophagus.” “Don’t drop the bandwagon” is another of his remarks. The carsophagus is a form of peripatetic vehicle in which the effects of the object on the environment are built back into the object. This is something that is characteristic of electric circuits.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The new feeling that people have about guilt is not something that can be privately assigned to some individual, but is, rather, something shared by everybody, in some mysterious way.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 40

“And eh—we’re gonna have some questions—but…”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“I’m merely using this as an illustration of a basic theme that anything becomes a work of art as soon as it is surrounded by a new environment.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation.”

— John Cage, “Silence: Lectures and Writings”

“Television has been labeled sterile.”

— narrator

“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

“A ditto, ditto device”

“Drop this jiggery-pokery and talk straight turkey.”

— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”

“Uh-ah.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“One way of putting it is to say, for the first time in human history, there is more information and data outside the classroom or the school situation than inside.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The young today live mythically and in depth. But they encounter instruction in situations organized by means of classified information—subjects are unrelated, they are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint. Many of our institutions suppress all the natural direct experience of youth, who respond with untaught delight to the poetry and the beauty of the new technological environment, the environment of popular culture. It could be their door to all past achievement if studied as an active (and not necessarily benign) force.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The new principle: how does that grab ya, is a more involved, multi-sensualist approach to the problem of meaning.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I discovered… a kind of massage. What you need. And what you do with them, is take the cover off, take the binding off, and then put the book together, sequentially, but not necessarily in just one straight line, across the wall. And the look of that is something completely different then other again. And some of the images just jump off the wall, I noticed. That famous foot that you…, brilliant! And then if you hang it up…”

— discussion in the serie ‘Word Count’ on WBAI-FM with John Culkin and Quentin Fiore. Moderator: Samuel Blazer.

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-0”

“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

“I–I hardly know, sir, just at present–at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”

— Lewis Carroll, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”

“Come and get it!”

“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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“If an ad has become so environmental as to be unperceived, that’s when it’s really doing it’s work.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“At the high speeds of electric communication, purely visual means of apprehending the world are no longer possible; they are just too slow to be relevant or effective.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Thanks very much!”

— 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

“From his cool office in Toronto he has taken a whole generation by the scruff of the neck and said look at this problem whether I irritate you into it or seduce you into it. He’s just made a certain kind of awareness.”

— discussion in the serie ‘Word Count’ on WBAI-FM with John Culkin and Quentin Fiore. Moderator: Samuel Blazer.

“Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Eh. We can, eh … have to make a distinction. I believe it. I truly believe it. For another photograph. … That’s incredible! … Because he’s a very unlikely hero in many ways.”

— discussion in the serie ‘Word Count’ on WBAI-FM with John Culkin and Quentin Fiore. Moderator: Samuel Blazer.

“Environments [are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which] are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 8

“The new environment goes around the old environment, and turns the old one into an art form. This happened to the Greeks, it happened to the Romans, it happened to the Middle Ages, it happened to the Renaissance, and so on. There’s no lack of evidence of this happening. Now, at the present time, I mentioned the strange fate of the planet as art form resulting from the new environment of satellite and electronic information.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Compartmentalization of occupations and interests bring about a seperation of that mode of activity commonly called ‘practice’ from insight, of imagination from executive ‘doing’.”

— John Dewey, “Art as Experience”

“Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of “time” and “space” and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men. It has reconstituted dialogue on a global scale. Its message is Total Change, ending psychic, social, economic, and political parochialism.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“But let’s go back for a moment to the eighteenth-century landscape picturesque artists. Having devised this landscape as a way of controlling the mental life of populations, there came shortly after, in the middle of the nineteenth century, a sudden break in which the artist said: it is the inner life, not the outer landscape, that counts.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Because something is happening
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?”

— Bob Dylan, “Ballad Of A Thin Man”

“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

“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 dropout represents a rejection of nineteenth century technology as manifested in our educational establishments. The teach-in represents a creative effort, switching the educational process from package to discovery.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Address at Vision 65” , p. 12

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

— narrator

“Teachers are strongly inclined to make their own books for their own classes designed specifically for the needs of a particular class.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— narrator

“In the “Republic,” Plato vigorously attacked the oral, poetized form as a vehicle for communicating knowledge. He pleaded for a more precise method of communication and classification (“The Ideas”), one which would favor the investigation of facts, principles of reality, human nature, and conduct. What the Greeks meant by “poetry” was radically different from what we mean by poetry. Their “poetic” expression was a product of a collective psyche and mind. The mimetic form, a technique that exploited rhythm, meter, and music, achieved the desired psychological response in the listener. Listeners could memorize with greater ease what was sung than what was said. Plato attacked this method because it discouraged disputation and argument. It was in his opinion the chief obstacle to abstract, speculative reasoning—he called it “a poison, and an enemy of the people.””

— Marshall McLuhan

“How shall the new environment be programmed now that we have become so involved with each other, now that all of us have become the unwitting work force for social change?”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The safety car is another peculiar example of electric circuitry afflicting a mechanical object, that is, the consequences of the car are now being felt by the designers of the car whereas formerly they merely concerned themselves with the projectile. You hurled it out into the public and let the chips fall where they may. But suddenly in the age of circuitry the feedback is coming into the design. Product design now takes on the character of audience participation.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“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

“It isn’t that I don’t like current events. There have just been so many of them lately.”

— Robert J. Day, drawing in “The New Yorker”

“A mother doesn’t have a job; she has sixty jobs, and that’s a role. A top exec doesn’t have a job; he has many jobs simultaneously, and that is a role. I think this is happening to all of us in varying degrees.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“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

“I was talking to a group of managers one time, and I thought I’d try it out on them. It seemed to me plausible to suggest to them that the real future of old age in business is discovery. They were quite struck by this. It seemed to make profound sense—most of them were over forty. But the point about old age as a period of discovery contradicts the merely chronological approach to things. But the older man in business is a man who knows the field, and he’s in a much better position to be a discoverer than some younger man who is merely job-holding. And so there’s hope.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“It’s also a job which threatens to deprive people of identity, the personal concept.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“(By comparison, press, movies, and radio are mere packaging devices for consumers.)”

— Marshall McLuhan

“amateur”

“In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. This creates a sort of inwardness, a sort of reverse perspective which has much in common with Oriental art.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The United States was invented in the eighteenth century. Wasn’t it Adlai Stevenson who said, “Columbus went too far”? This business of leapfrogging is not without its significant features.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The poet, the artist, the sleuth—whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely “well adjusted,” he cannot go along with currents and trends.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 7

“[Symbolism] was a big moment in the history of art and culture that concerns us because they discovered that the meaning then of the work of art was not as a conveyor or a package, but the meaning of this was as a probe, an exploratory probe into the outer world.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Which does recall; from the land of the DEW Line, I can bring you a special kind of world of jokes that you may not have encountered, namely the grievance joke associated with French Canada. It’s not like the Pole joke or the Italian joke, and so on.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“For example, suppose a group of elementary schoolchildren were given the job of trying to find out what was happening to America since color TV. Teams of them could be turned loose in just making inventories of effects observable in clothing, in food, in cars, in designs, in family life, in all sorts of forms. If they merely made inventories, they didn’t have to use any ideas, they didn’t have to reach any conclusions, they merely were invited to observe, to make inventories of effects. Small children love this kind of work, and are just as able researchers as any team of sociologists in the world. And the accumulation of such inventories can be absolutely necessary and indispensable to the highest operations.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“God, I’m so hungry.”

“Terrific!”

“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 reevaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“He has proved himself, for he is alive.”

— Elias Canetti, “The Survivor”

“The machine and the motorcar released the horse and projected it into the plane of entertainment, so does automation with men. We are suddenly threatened with a liberation that taxes our inner resources of self-employment and imaginative participation in society. This would seem to be a fate that calls men to the role of artist in society.”

— 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

“I was hearing a sociologist today suggest that it was quite impossible to make a direct connection between television and any change whatever. This is in a certain sense true. On the other hand […].”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Rationality” and logic came to depend on the presentation of connected and sequential facts or concepts. For many people rationality still has the connotation of uniformity and connectiveness. “I don’t follow you” means “I don’t think what you’re saying is rational.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Hence, the return, for example, of poetic drama, because the dramatists discovered that if you want to really involve the audience in the action of a play you must not use prose, which merely leaves them talking at each other and to each other, the audience, and the actors. You must use poetry which brings the audience right up onto the stage.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“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

“I once presented one of my children with a strange object. It was actually a yearbook from Rice University, and it was about six by six inches square, just cards taped together, and it had the little stories and poems of the year. When our thirteen-year-old saw this, he said, “Dad, that’s real cool”. And he was using the term quite correctly.”

— 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

“Silence is the unintended sounds of our environment.”

— John Cage, derived from Calvin Tomkins in “The Bride and the Bachelors” and referred to in “Address at Vision 65” , p. 7

“And [that] the business of the teaching establishment is to train perception upon the outer environment instead of merely stenciling information upon the brain pans of children inside the environment.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“When a person is both involved and detached, he has to identify with the creative process.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[Printing] created the portable book, which men could read in privacy and in isolation from others. Man could now inspire—and conspire.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Electric circuitry has rudely thrust us into a world that is quite unusual and quite unlike any previous world and for which no previous model of perception will serve.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Pop art is a recognition that the outer environment is itself capable of being processed like art. And this, I think, is an electronic phenomenon that only in an age of electronic immediacy and totality could we ever dream of tackling the whole human environment as a work of art. This is happening to us. And pop art is merely a report to the nation, as it were, that this event is taking place and that we can prepare ourselves accordingly.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“And no story, just an effect. And it’s an effect of a story: everything happening at once—without a connecting story. All the jokes, the elephant jokes and so on, are all in this pattern.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns. We are suddenly eager to have things and beings declare their being totally.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Thanks”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The very speeded-up world we live in guarantees that we can all have a highly integrated existence which really points in the direction of role-playing rather than of job-holding.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“You see, Dad, Professor McLuhan says the environment that man creates becomes his medium for defining his role in it. The invention of type created linear, or sequential, thought, separating thought from action. Now, with TV and folk singing, thought and action are closer and social involvement is greater. We again live in a village. Get it?”

— Alan Dunn, drawing in “The New Yorker”

“The older training of observation has become quite irrelevant in this new time, because it is based on psychological responses and concepts conditioned by the former technology—mechanization.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Earlier the arts had been more concerned with simply permitting the audience to enjoy the sense of community and festive involvement. Medieval arts, as we are popularly aware, were festive and communal and participative. They were not intended to give any sense of privileged or elite life.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Students of media are persistently attacked as evaders, idly concentrating on means or processes rather than on “substance.” The dramatic and rapid changes of “substance” elude these accusers.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“You mean weddings between RCA and publishing?”

— Marshall McLuhan

“As we begin, so shall we go.”

“There is [absolutely] no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”

— John Culkin, “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan” (The Saturday Review)

“Ad people imagine that if you can remember their ads they’ve made a hit. But that’s not so.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“And the symbolists—the Rimbauds, the Wagners, the Baudelaires—began to examine the inner mental landscape as something that could be programmed as a means of enriching consciousness, of creating an inclusive consciousness.”

— 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

“And the nun thanked the lad who replied: That’s all right Madame, any relative of Batman is a friend of mine!”

“Well there is a mobile mic down there for people with questions.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“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

“{,.;:}?!{‘’-“”}”

“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

“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

“And they became intensely interested in the mythic consciousness, in the corporate consciousness of the mythic man, and in the Jungian archetype.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“You mean, life isn’t a fountain?”

“As design and communications mold the environment, so they shape human perceptions, which—processed at speeds consistent with the electronic information movement—induce changes in human institutions at a rate that for the first time in human history makes change the subject.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 7

“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

“So it is typical of our time, or any other time, perhaps, that they should tackle this new form of technology and put it on the old job-classified data. What we’re doing with the computer up until now is merely giving it to the librarians and to the card cataloguers.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[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

“A strange bond often exists among anti-social types in their power to see environments as they really are.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“With Kiss. Kiss Criss. Cross Criss. Kiss Cross.”

— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“AS LONG AS ONE HUMAN BEING IS HUNGRY, THE ENTIRE HUMAN RACE IS HUNGRY.”

— Buckminster Fuller, quoted in “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” by John Cage

“Jobs represent a relatively recent pattern of work organization. From the fifteenth century to the twentieth century, there is a steady progress of fragmentation of the stages of work that constitute mechanization and specialism. These procedures cannot serve for survival or sanity in this new time.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Instead of just creating—as the Romantic artists [the symbolists] had done—creating a mood, they began to work on the idea of the total consciousness.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“(Carl Orff, the noted contemporary German composer, has refused to accept as a student any but the pre-school child whose spontaneous sense perceptions have not yet been channeled by formal, literary, visual prejudices.)”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 40

“Homer’s “Iliad” was the cultural encyclopedia of pre-literate Greece, the didactic vehicle that provided men with guidance for the management of their spiritual, ethical, and social lives. All the persuasive skills of the poetic and the dramatic idiom were marshaled to insure the faithful transmission of the tradition from generation to generation.”

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

“some
like
it
cold.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— narrator

“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

“[B]ecause a retrieval system of very high speed brushes so many facets of knowledge together, so many kinds of layers of experience get brushed together that they reveal structures, they reveal forms, they reveal the life of forms, they reveal knowledge in all sorts of new patterns.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“So the computer offers many advantages besides just the threat to wipe out jobs and provide leisure.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“WHAT’LL HAPPEN WHEN INTELLIGENCE IS RECOGNIZED AS A GLOBAL RESOURCE?”

— Buckminster Fuller, quoted in “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” by John Cage

“[Television] will not work as a background. It engages you. Perhaps this is why so many people feel that their identity has been threatened. This charge of the light brigade has heightened our general awareness of the shape and meaning of lives and events to a level of extreme sensitivity.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“{The method of our time is to use not single but multiple models for [experimental] exploration—the technique of the suspended judgment} [is the discovery of the twentieth century as the technique of invention was the discovery of the nineteenth.]”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 71

“And the future of the planet as Williamsburg, as work of art, as carefully prepared archeological exhibit, is really quite amusing.”

— 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

“Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.”

— Marshall McLuhan, “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 22

“The dateline is the only organizing principle in a newspaper.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Listening to the simultaneous messages of Dublin, James Joyce released the greatest flood of oral linguistic music that was ever manipulated into art.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Now hold it. Eh, that’s part of the script!”

“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

“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

“Can I have the eh…”

“We have now to accept the fact and responsibility that the entire human environment is an artifact. An art form. [Something that can be staged, manipulated, like showbiz.]”

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

“You see, in earlier days the newspaper, each day’s paper, came out as a big paper of editorial that were all unified. Then as the news services improved it became impossible to unify so they broke down the story line. But in the same way, TV has stripped the story line off the novel.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“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 discovery that the medium is the massage or message] was a big breakthrough, because what they discovered was that the function of art is to teach human perception. Conrad’s remark that’s often quoted, “It is, before all, to make you see!”—not that you may know this or that, but that you may have the means of perceiving.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Just you and me George.”

“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

“The thing of it is, we must live with the living.”

— Montaigne, “Of the Art of Conversation” (Book III, Ch. 8.)

“The disappearance of story line all goes along with the disappearance of clothes lines, hemlines, stag lines, you name it.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Alright, I had an impression, a hunch …”

“The old civic, state, and national groupings have become unworkable.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[In the name of “progress”,] our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Counterblast” (1954)

“[And] the Western man tends to be either involved or detached, but not both at once. So this is a new development in our society. It is a complicated idea, and it is a profoundly creative idea.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“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

“The artists usually go through these maneuvers fifty or more years before the engineers get around of them. And so the advantage of knowing art is orientation in a complex world. It gives you fifty-year breathing space before the thing hits, and that is a considerable advantage.”

— 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

“Uh, professor McLuhan”

“Joyce called it all space in a naught shell, a naught shell being an eternal present.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“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

“Breakfast is on the table!”

“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

““Backward countries” now have a huge advantage over us. We now stand in relation to electronic technology much as we once stood in relation to print technology.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I’m not trying to make any prophecies or any gloomy observations at all, I simply notice these changes.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“A fact of interplay.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Real news is bad news—bad news about somebody, or bad news for somebody.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Electrically-recorded voiceprints, like fingerprints, are now being accepted as evidence by some courts.”

— 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

“Let hear us some electric circuitry”. “Very good idea”. “Wait for us.”

“Yes: the effect however, the effect of TV on movie—or of movie on TV—has been more profound than that. When you’re looking at—just to answer your question—when you’re looking at movie on TV, you’re watching TV, you’re not seeing a movie. However, that is, the translation is into TV, not into movie.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I must have been delirious, for I even sought amusement in speculating upon the relative velocities of their several descents towards the foam below.”

— Edgar Allen Poe, “A Descent into the Maelstrom” as quoted in “The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man”, p. v

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

— narrator

“This idea of training all our resources upon a complex world which needs perception very badly, this idea that the future of the future is the present, this idea that if you examine the present deeply enough you will find all possible futures, this became a very common idea to the symbolists and to people around the later nineteenth century. It’s an idea that gives art a profound role as a teacher of perception rather than as a conveyor of some precious content.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“So a novel, and movie and tv, have this profound kind of relationship that the movie is undergoing, very rapid change along with the novel as a result of contact with TV.”

— 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

“In other words, if you notice that the motorcar created road systems and vast servicing industries, you would probably have a better idea of the motorcar than you could have from photographic images of cars in catalogues.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“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

“This last week was like a total breakdown.”

— Franz Kafka, “Diaries”

“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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“We hear sounds from everywhere, without ever having to focus. Sounds come from “above,” from “below,” from in “front” of us, from “behind” us, from our “right,” from our “left.” We can’t shut out sound automatically. We simply are not equipped with earlids.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Innumerable confusion and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions, such as our own. Our “Age of Anxiety” is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools—with yesterday’s concepts. [With yesterday’s ideals.]”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 274

“It may very well be that in our conscious inner lives the interplay among our senses is what constitutes our sense of touch. Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things but the very life and encounter of things in the mind.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Should old Aquinas be forgot.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“In an electric information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained—ignored. Too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Are you now or have you ever been… ? {Are you aware of the fact…? I have here before me….}”

— narrator

“There’s a pleasant story about Malraux taking General de Gaulle around an art gallery recently and pointing out this and that. And de Gaulle was saying, “Uh, ah, what’s that one over there?” and Malraux said, “That’s a Dufy.” “And what’s that one?” “Oh, that’s a Renoir.” “Ah,” says de Gaulle suddenly, “I know that cartoon over there, that must be a Rouault?” “No, sir, that’s a mirror.” Rouault came to mind because he too was a rear projectionist, that is, the light came through the image to the viewer. This light through or rear projection creates a much higher degree of involvement than otherwise is possible. The painters suddenly wanted to involve the audience deeply in their images with all their senses.”

— 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

“When you get the characters on the row then you begin to get novels with plots. But the fictional form is a very peculiar one. And it’s disappearing very rapidly.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The first motorcars were made with buggy whip holders. And the new automation computer devices are being made as if they were card catalogues.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“In the same way slang can be an indicator of subtle change of sensibility, shifting patterns of perception. And if our youngsters were encouraged to pay the utmost attention and respect to slang from this point of view, it might clarify some of the problems they have.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Because of its rich resources and means of sensuous solicitation, modern advertising can give you the effect of almost anything without your having to bother about having the thing at all.”

— 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

“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

“The shock of recognition!”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The printed book as a form created the public, and Montaigne said upon recognizing the existence of this new entity, this new environment called the public: “I owe la publique a complete portrait of myself.””

— Marshall McLuhan

“AS MCLUHAN SAYS, EVERYTHING HAPPENS AT ONCE.”

— John Cage, “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)”

“When the railway was new in the nineteenth century, people formed an image not of the railway and the new world it was creating, the new cities. They formed an image of an Arcadian retreat, a pastoral, innocent world, a Jeffersonian paradise. That was their image of the railway. As soon as they banged into the railway, they translated themselves back into an agrarian, Arcadian pastoral world.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“When advanced systems of those so called typesetting really get going then I think that it would be very simple to – and inexpensive and quite reasonable – to simply record conversation.”

“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

“Yes, sir.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Like old silents on TV, the planet is now becoming the content of our own man-made environment.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I don’t know whether there’s going to be anymore fuzz and feathers about it or not. It has simply happened. It isn’t something that’s going to happen, they dropped out. But they may be persuaded to go to school again.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I know there’s a lot of controversial territory in between those two positions. This strange clash between the old Romantic art of the outer landscape and the new symbolist art of the inner landscape or of human consciousness, inclusive human consciousness, was already a kind of indicator of the strange condition in which we are today, in which we begin to extend the very means of awareness into the environment, in other words, extending consciousness.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“The visual pattern of the sculptured costume, starched costume of the nun, bares a certain structural relation to Batmans costume. So that the strange bridge between the nun and Batman is a bit of pattern recognition or visual punning.”

“We shall overcome!”

“It was the print-oriented genius of the Western world that created and applied knowledge and technology unrivalled in human history and learned to manipulate matter, energy and human life by breaking down every useful process into its functional parts, then producing any required number of each part.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— narrator

“There was a time when the job of royalty, of the prince, was not to learn any special skill, but simply to grow up.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Baby, this thing is bigger than all of us.”

“The main obstacle to a clear understanding of the effects of the new media is our deeply embedded habit of regarding all phenomena from a fixed point of view. We speak, for instance, of “gaining perspective.” This psychological process derives unconsciously from print technology.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“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

“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

“The daily paper is a good example of a happening because everything that’s in it happens at the same moment.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“In television there occurs an extension of the sense of active, exploratory touch which involves all the senses simultaneously, rather than that of sight alone. You have to be “with” it. But in all electric phenomena, the visual is only one component in a complex interplay. Since, in the age of information, most transactions are managed electrically, the electric technology has meant for Western man a considerable drop in the visual component, in his experience, and a corresponding increase in the activity of his other senses.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“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

“”Authorship”—in the sense we know it today, individual intellectual effort related to the book as an economic commodity—was practically unknown before the advent of print technology. Medieval scholars were indifferent to the precise identity of the “books” they studied. In turn, they rarely signed even what was clearly their own. They were a humble service organization. Procuring texts was often a very tedious and time-consuming task. Many small texts were transmitted into volumes of miscellaneous content, very much like “jottings” in a scrapbook, and, in this transmission, authorship was often lost.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

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

“I like that hair!” “Hihihi”

“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 major advances of civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.”

— A.N. Whitehead, “Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect”

“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

“Take it easy, but take it.”

— John Cage, “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)”

“The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.”

— Marshall McLuhan, “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 31

“If you notice this Orientalizing of the Western world, it would be impertinent and somewhat fatuous to approve or disapprove of anything that concerned the life of nations and many, many millions of people simultaneously. It would be very much like the position of Margaret Fuller, one of Bucky’s relatives, by the way, who said back, what, in 1850: “I accept the universe.” And Emerson, I think it was, who said, “She’d better!””

— 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

“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

“In our present time you see there are many countries in the world who are leapfrogging out of 10,000 B.C. into the twentieth century. Many countries that are doing this, leapfrogging out of prehistory into post-history.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“When my act first caught on, I had offered every major publishing house to do a book on anything at all. That’s not writing. That’s exploiting!”

— Woody Allen

“Well, in terms of our own children’s lives, our children today, small children, anywhere up to the teenage group, they have gone inside themselves in the sense of taking themselves with profound seriousness. They’re not looking for goals. LAT, the old movie world with its camera angles outward, they’re looking for roles, involvement, participation. And again, I’m not proving or disapproving, it’s simply something that happened.”

— 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

“Most of our technologies depend upon two or more technologies wedding each other. ”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The thing novel, the Roman shows, has come in along with the Fellini or VanDerBeek movie. The movie without the story line is a movie more subtly responsive to modulations of complex environments and human needs. It’s what many people find very baffling—and you see Dr Zhivago as no story line to speak of, but that’s not because of the influence of TV. It’s simply because Russians never needed a story line, they were always a corporate, collective sense. They sensed the meaning of vast environmental changes, and corporate changes. And so, in War and Peace and in Dr Zhivago you have this sense of MASS, collective energy, reshaping whole populations. And so a narrative, a mere narrative story line from a personal point of view of an author, doesn’t tend to exist.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[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

“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”

“[You know, t]he most favourable moment to seize a man and influence him is when he is alone in the mass.”

— Jacques Ellul, “Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes”

“There’ll probably be some music, but we’ll manage to find a quiet corner where we can talk.”

— Erik Satie, quoted in “Silence: Lectures and Writings” by John Cage

“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

“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

“Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community’s need to know.”

— Marshall McLuhan