Marshall McLuhan: Culture

Marshall McLuhan was Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a communications theorist. Explore interesting quotes on culture.
Marshall McLuhan: 832 quotes16 likes

“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

“Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 86

“Jacques Ellul observes in Propaganda: When dialogue begins, propaganda ends. His theme, that propaganda is not this or that ideology but rather the action and coexistence of all media at once, explains why propaganda is environmental and invisible. The total life of any culture tends to be "propaganda", for this reason. It blankets perception and supresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, From Cliché to Archetype (1970), p.77

“There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 60

“The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970), p. 168

“Scribal culture could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by typography.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 149

“Prolonged mimesis of the alphabet and its fragmenting properties produced a new dominant mode of perception and then of culture.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 17

“A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various externalizations of our senses.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 49

“The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 103

“The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 74

“We are numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture. (p. 16)”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Understanding Media (1964)

“The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of culture, as Harold Innis was the first to show.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 56

“When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 47

“At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology. (p. 300)”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Understanding Media (1964)

“The comic strip: upholder of Homeric culture.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p.19

“Unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitutes a total and near-instanteous transformation of culture, values and attitudes.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Playboy Interview (1969)

“Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Through the Vanishing Point (1968)