Marshall McLuhan: Trending quotes (page 11)

“All media are extensions of some human faculty -- psychic or physical.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967)

“We are swiftly moving at present from an era where business was our culture into an era when culture will be our business. Between these poles stand the huge and ambiguous entertainment industries.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 384

Business

“The 4 aspects of each of the media actually constitute the four features of all metaphors. In other words, all human technologies whatever are, in the fullest sense, linguistic outerings, or utterings, of man.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 275

Sense

“Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 85

Nature

“Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Understanding Media (1964)

Sense , Time

“The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Understanding Media (1964)

“Today, computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 80

“One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information system.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 298

“Native societies did not think of themselves as being in the world as occupants but considered that their rituals created the world and keep it operational.”

Marshall McLuhan

College and University Journal, Volumes 6-7, American College Public Relations Association, 1967, p. 3
1960s

World , Thinking

“All words at every level of prose and poetry and all devices of language and speech derive their meaning from figure / ground relation.”

Marshall McLuhan

quoted in McLuhan: A Guide for the Perplexed by W. Terrence Gordon, 2010, p. 167
1980s

“The celebrated earthy tactility of Rabelais is a massive backwash of receding manuscript culture.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 170

“There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation.”

Marshall McLuhan

Letter to Harold Adam Innis (14 March 1951), published in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 223
1950s

Time

“Q: Do you feel a need to be distinctive and mass-produced? Q: Are you in the groove? That is, are you moving in ever-diminishing circles? Q: How often do you change your mind, your politics, your clothes?”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 121-125

Feeling , Change , Clothes

“The hot radio medium used in cool or nonliterate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 30

“The sheer increase in the quantity of information movement favoured the visual organization of knowledge and the rise of perspective even before typography.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 128

Knowledge

“The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived with the figure minus ground.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 114

“The Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 14

Age , Feeling

“The medieval student had to be paleographer, editor, and publisher of the authors he read.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 109

Reading

“Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967)

Men

“The user is the content of any situation, whether its driving a car, or wearing clothes or watching a show. The user is content.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder (1976)

Cars , Clothes