Marshall McLuhan: News

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

“The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.”

Marshall McLuhan book The Gutenberg Galaxy

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)
Context: The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village. (p. 36)

“Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. (p.46)”

Marshall McLuhan book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Understanding Media (1964)

“The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature.”

Marshall McLuhan

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

“New media are new languages, their grammar and syntax yet unknown.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 229

“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

“The invention of typography confirmed and extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly repeatable “commodity,” the first assembly-line, and the first mass-production.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 142

“McLuhan after his September 1979 stroke. Brand, Stewart. "McLuhan's last words." New Scientist, 29 Jan 1981.”

Marshall McLuhan

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1980s

“At the very high speed of living, everybody needs a new career and a new job and a totally new personality every ten years.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Forces interview (1973)

“The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature…The new media are not ways of relating us to the old world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.”

Marshall McLuhan

Media as the New Nature, 1969, p. 14
1960s

“Typography as the first mechanization of a handicraft is itself the perfect instance not of a new knowledge, but of applied knowledge.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 171

“When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.”

Marshall McLuhan

Location, Volume 1 Issues 1-2, 1963, p. 44
1960s

“The city no longer exists except as a cultural ghost for tourists. Any highway eatery with its TV set, newspaper and magazine is as cosmopolitan as New York or Paris.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p.12

“Dantzig explains why the language of number had to be increased to meet the needs created by the new technology of letters.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 200

“Interdeterminacy was a figure-ground problem arising from incongruity between the visual bias of classical science and the new acoustic sensibilities.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 44

“The new science of communication is percept, not concept.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 259

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

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 16

“Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness…This is a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Playboy Interview (1969)

“Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 136

“If we sit and talk in a dark room, words suddenly acquire new meanings and different textures…and on the radio. Given only the sound of a play, we have to fill in all of the senses, not just the sight of the action. So much do-it-yourself, or completion and “closure” of action, develops a kind of independent isolation in the young that makes them remote and inaccessible.””

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 264

“It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 53