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
Affluence creates poverty.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Poverty
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Family, Babies
Most clear writing is a sign that there is no exploration going on. Clear prose indicates the absence of thought.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Writing
Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Advertising, Abundance
Jokes are grievances.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Jokes, Humor
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Experience
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Art, Arts, Artists
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
The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Names, Identity
Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.
—Marshall Mcluhan
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: Advertising, Harmony, Aspirations
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
Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: One liners, Mental Illness
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Information
Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Anxiety, Technology
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
A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Reading, Books
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 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
There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.
—Marshall Mcluhan
It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudo-simplicities of brutal directness.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Sincerity, Candor
The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Conformity
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, Arts, Art
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
The real news is bad news.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Media, Journalism, Journalists
It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Technology
‘Money talks’ because money is a metaphor, a transfer, and a bridge.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: One liners
There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Earth
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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