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
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, Art, Artists
When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Shopping
The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Driving
Money is a poor man’s credit card.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Debt
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Experience
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Opinion, Luxury, Opinions
Good taste is the first refuge of the non creative. It is the last ditch stand of the artist.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Style, Taste
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Family, Babies
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
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
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Information
The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Media, Independence
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
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Artists, Arts, Art
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
The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Technology
Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Arts, Artists, Art
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
Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Eloquence, Conversation
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
Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.
—Marshall Mcluhan
The modern little red riding hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objections to being eaten by the wolf.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Advertising
You can be a French Canadian or an English Canadian, but not a Canadian. We know how to live without an identity, and this is one of our marvellous resources.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Canada
One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There’s always more than you can cope with.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Information
American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver’s license age than at voting age.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Elections, Voting, Youth
Most clear writing is a sign that there is no exploration going on. Clear prose indicates the absence of thought.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Writing
For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Time, Time Management
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
Affluence creates poverty.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Poverty
Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. 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 ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to loose.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Awareness
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