Marshall McLuhan: Environment

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

“All of the new media have enriched our perceptions of language and older media. They are to the man-made environment what species are to biology.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 84

“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

“When you move into a new area, a new territory and learn a new language, the language is not a new subject, it is an environment, it is total. (p. 105)”

Marshall McLuhan

1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011)

“Environments work us over and remake us. It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 90

“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

“We now live in a technologically prepared environment that blankets the earth itself. The humanly contrived environment of electric information and power has begun to take precedence over the old environment of "nature." Nature, as it were, begins to be the content of our technology.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, A McLuhan Sourcebook (1995), p. 276

“Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.”

Marshall McLuhan

Letter to Clare Westcott, November 26 1975. Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p. 514
1970s

“When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970), p. 180

“Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature.</i”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 11

“Marx shared with economists then and since the inability to make his concepts include innovational processes. It is one thing to spot a new product but quite another to observe the invisible new environments generated by the action of the product on a variety of pre-existing social grounds.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 63

“Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception.”

Marshall McLuhan

Eye Appeal, p. 79-80
1950s, The Mechanical Bride (1951)

“Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

“The role of the artist is to create an Anti-environment as a means of perception and adjustment.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 31

“The new overkill is simply an extension of our nervous system into a total ecological service environment. Such a service environment can liquidate or terminate its beneficiaries as naturally as it sustains them.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 152

“New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 47

“Languages are environments to which the child related synesthetically.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 166

“Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967)