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
It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudo-simplicities of brutal directness.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Friendship
The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete.
—Marshall Mcluhan
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: Science, Technology
It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Technology
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
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Opinion, Luxury
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Art, Artists
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
Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
—Marshall Mcluhan
The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Names
‘Money talks’ because money is a metaphor, a transfer, and a bridge.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: One liners
Money is a poor man’s credit card.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Debt
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
Good taste is the first refuge of the non creative. It is the last ditch stand of the artist.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Style, Taste
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Information
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
For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Time Management, Time
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
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
Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Advertising
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
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: Artists, Art
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Babies, Family
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
Most clear writing is a sign that there is no exploration going on. Clear prose indicates the absence of thought.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Writing
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Experience
Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Media, Advertising
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
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 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
Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Media
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
The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
—Marshall Mcluhan
The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Conformity
Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.
—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
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
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
There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
—Marshall Mcluhan
It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudo-simplicities of brutal directness.
—Marshall Mcluhan
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