Marshall McLuhan: Man

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

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

“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

“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

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

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Understanding Media (1964)

“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

“We have become like the most primitive Palaeolithic man, once more global wanderers, but information gatherers rather than food gatherers. From now on the source of food, wealth and life itself will be information.”

Marshall McLuhan

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

“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

“Cervantes confronted typographic man in the figure of Don Quixote.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 242

“The typographic lore of school children points to the gap between the scribal and typographic man.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 103

“The Homeric hero becomes a split-man as he assumes an individual ego.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 58

“Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.”

Marshall McLuhan

Access, Issues 165-176, National Citizens Committee for Broadcasting, 1984, p. xxiii
1980s

“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

“A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor?”

Marshall McLuhan

A play on the line's in Robert Browning's poem "Andrea del Sarto":
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?
Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p.7

“All of man's artefacts, whether hardware or software, whether bulldozers or laws of chemistry, are alike linguistic in structure and intent.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 227

“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)

“In this book we turn to the study of new patterns of energy arising from man’s physical and psychic artifacts and social organizations. The only method for perceiving process and pattern is by inventory of effects obtained by the comparison and contrast of developing situations.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 8

“For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1950s, The Mechanical Bride (1951), p. 85; "Magic that Changes Mood")