Marshall Mcluhan (1911–80,) fully Herbert Marshall McLuhan, was a Canadian writer and thinker. He became well known in the 1960s for his maxim ‘the medium is the message’ and his contention that it is the characteristics of a particular medium rather than the information it disseminates influences and controls communities.
Born in Edmonton, Mcluhan studied English literature at the universities of Manitoba and Cambridge, and in 1946 became a professor at St Michael’s College, Toronto. In 1963, having led two examinations into culture and communication media, he was appointed director of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Culture and Technology.
Mcluhan held the controversial view that the invention of printing, with its emphasis on the eye rather than the ear, led to the destruction of a cohesive, interdependent society. He contended that it prompts humans to be more introspective, individualistic, and self-centered.
Mcluhan’s publications include The Mechanical Bride (1951,) The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962,) Understanding Media (1964,) The Medium is the Message (1967; with Q Fiore,) and Counter-Blast (1970.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Marshall Mcluhan
Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Conversation, Eloquence
The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Driving
Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Mental Illness, One liners
The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Propaganda
Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Assumptions
Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Abundance, Advertising
If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist’s couch.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Psychiatry
The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Media
Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Technology, Anxiety
Affluence creates poverty.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Poverty
As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Arts, Artists, Art
Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Diet, Enjoyment, Appetite
Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Space
Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but, disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Shopping
A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Books, Reading
It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Technology
As the age of information demands the simultaneous use of all our faculties, we discover that we are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Knowledge
The school system, custodian of print culture, has no place for the rugged individual. It is, indeed, the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Education
Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Work
The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Driving
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Experience
Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Media
The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Media, Independence
Most clear writing is a sign that there is no exploration going on. Clear prose indicates the absence of thought.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Writing
The machine called Nature into an art form. For the first time at men began to regard Nature as a source of aesthetic and spiritual values.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Wilderness
A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Manners
The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Business
Acoustic space has the basic character of a sphere whose focus or centre is simultaneously everywhere and whose margin is nowhere.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Space
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Opinion, Luxury, Opinions
Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Technology, Science
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America—not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Television
Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.
—Marshall Mcluhan
It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Critics, Criticism, Art
Money is a poor man’s credit card.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Debt
Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Politicians, Politics
It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudo-simplicities of brutal directness.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Sincerity, Candor
Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Harmony, Advertising, Aspirations
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Media
In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Conscience
Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Advertising, Media
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