Marshall McLuhan: Environment

“We live invested in an electric information environment that is quite as imperceptible to us as water is to fish.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 5

Fish , Water

“Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.”

Marshall McLuhan

"The Care and Feeding of Communication Innovation", Dinner Address to Conference on 8 mm Sound Film and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, 8 November 1961
1960s

Sense

“One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.”

Marshall McLuhan book War and Peace in the Global Village

Source: War and Peace in the Global Village

Fish , Water

“Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.”

Marshall McLuhan

“All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967), p. 26
Source: The Medium is the Massage

Way , Understanding , Knowledge , Change

“The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 98

Personality

“Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.”

Marshall McLuhan

American scholar, Volume 35, 1965, p. 200
1960s

Change

“People in new environments always produce the new preceptual modality without any difficulty or awareness of change. It is later that the psychic and social realignments baffle societies.”

Marshall McLuhan

ARTnews annual, Volume 31, Art Foundation, 1966, p. 56
1960s

People , Change

“Man in the electronic age has no possible environment except the globe and no possible occupation except information-gathering.”

Marshall McLuhan

1990s and beyond, "The Agenbite of Outwit" (1998)

Age

“Environment is process, not container. (p. 30)”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Counterblast (1969)

“Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a manmade environment that ends "Nature" and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed. Shakespeare at the Globe mentioning "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players" (As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7) has been justified by recent events in ways that would have struck him as entirely paradoxical. The results of living inside a proscenium arch of satellites is that the young now accept the public spaces of the earth as role-playing areas. Sensing this, they adopt costumes and roles and are ready to "do their thing" everywhere."”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, From Cliché to Archetype (1970), p.9-10

Women , Men , World , Way

“Without an anti-environment, all environments are invisible.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 33

“The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the ground rules of the environment. The ground rules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serves as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967), p. 93

“Youth instinctively understand the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967)

Youth , Understanding

“War has become the environment of our time if only because it is an accelerated form of innovation and education.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 381

War , Education , Time

“Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perception…When these ratios change, men change.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967)

Men , Sense , Change

“All media of communications are cliches serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns of associations and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, From Cliché to Archetype (1970)

Communication

“If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.”

Marshall McLuhan

To Wilfred Watson, October 6 1965. Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 325
1960s

Art , Painting

“The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.”

Marshall McLuhan

Mademoiselle: the magazine for the smart young woman, Volume 64, 1966, p. 114
1960s

“When we invent a new technology, we become cannibals. We eat ourselves alive since these technologies are merely extensions of ourselves. The new environment shaped by electric technology is a cannibalistic one that eats people. To survive one must study the habits of cannibals.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Hot & Cool (1967), p. 261

People , Study